Human Rights Watch International Film Festival Announces 2008 Line Up

The 2008 Human Rights Watch International Festival takes place from June 12 to 26 at Walter Reade Theater at NYC's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, presenting 32 films from 20 countries, including 16 feature length documentaries.

The doc subjects range from the legal battles waged by two Shoshone women to preserve their tribal land rights and by Sami Al-Arian, a outspoken Palestinian professor, to defend himself against accusations of funding terrorism, to the inspiring stories of women in Kashmir, Nepal and Israel who are tired of but not defeated by the ongoing wages of war in their homelands.

Human rights lawyer Reed Brody, dubbed the 'Dictator Hunter,' tracks former Chadian ruler Hissene Habre in an attempt to put him on trial for human rights abuses, while filmmaker Katrina Browne discovers that her ancesters were prominent slave traders and traces their activities from Rhode Island to Ghana to Cuba.

Many of the documentarians and their central characters will be at the festival's screenings, but the good news for doc lovers who can't join them at the Walter Reade Theater is that about half of the films in the great line up will be shown on TV in coming months.