Human Rights Watch International Film Festival - 2009 Program

This moving documentary brings the issue of female genital cutting to the city of Philadelphia, where a West African women fights for political asylum so she can stay in the US, and prevent her the forced circumcision of her two-year-old daughter--should she be forced to return to her homeland.

• Directors: Barbara Attie and Janet Goldwater
• Running time: 60 mins.

The tag line of My Neighbor My Killer is: "When peace comes, how do you make it right again?" The film takes us to Rwanda, to show us the struggle of surviving Tutsis and guilty Hutus to turn the bloodsoaked turf into common ground on which they can live in peace under Gacaca, a law establishing local tribunals in which citizen panels hear testimony from survivors and killers and pass judgment.

• Director: Anne Aghion
• Running time: 80 mins.

When the filmmaker takes a very personal journey to Vietnam to the land where her husband died, she discovers an unexpected sisterhood in the widows of soldiers who fought on the other side.

• Director: Barbara Sonneborn
• Running time: 72 mins.

The film's tag line: When the war ends, the work to save the land begins. This is a documentary about the effects of land mines set during the Iraq War and efforts to remove them before they claim innocent lives.

• Director: Jawad Metni
• Running time: 76 mins.

A moving story of women in South Africa who have turned their tragedy into a tool.

• Directors: Gabriela Gutierrez Dewar and Sally Gutierrez Dewar
• Running time: 88 mins.

A fascinating foray into the future, where we meet a sole survivor (Pete Postlethwaite) who uses archival news footage to take us on a countdown to show us what we did to cause our planet to be uninhabitable. Why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance?

• Director: Fanny Armstrong
• Running time: 89 mins.

The Reckoning: the Battle for the International Criminal Court film follows the world's highest tribunal's process, as guided by the brilliant and persistent chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, in its fight to bring those responsible for genocide and guilty of other crimes against humanity to justice. The US still hasn’t joined the International Criminal Court.

• Directors: Pamela Yates, Paco de Onis, and Peter Kinoy
• Running time: 95 mins.

A screwball buddy documentary about two guys who infiltrate corporate America and create some outrageous pranks to expose the greed that prevails in big business and show the impact it has on society.

• Directors: Mike Bonanno, Andy Bichlbaum, and Kurt Engfehr
• Running time: 87 mins.