Bangkok-based Patima Tungpuchayakul has committed her life to rescuing and returning home men from Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, and other Southeast Asian nations who have been sold to Thai fishing companies by human traffickers.

Once at sea, these captive men go months, even years, without setting foot on land, earning little to no pay, trapped in a modern form of slavery on the boats and forced to endure horrific and often deadly conditions.

Patima and her small team of activists risk their lives on remote Indonesian islands to find these men, fight for their emancipation and seek justice for them. In the face of illness, death threats, corruption, and complacency, Patima’s fearless determination reveals stories of criminal conspiracy at the heart of the global seafood industry, as she calls on her nation and the world to wake up and take action.

“You and I have to work together to tell this story. If this is going to change, it’s going to take all of us.”
Patima Tungpuchayakul, film subject

For further information about the Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2019, click here.

Join author Jamie Bartlett in conversation with academic, writer and speaker Matthew Goodwin to discuss the rise of the radical. Bartlett, delves into the disparate worlds of various communities that all have one theme in common – to seek to live radical lives in the world today. From talking to transhumanists in Las Vegas, to  nationalist, anti-Islam supporters in Germany, or visiting the Psychedelic Society in the Netherlands; these are just a few of the innovators, disruptors, idealists and extremists who think society is broken, and they have the answers to fix it.

Jamie Bartlett is a leading thinker in extreme politics and technology. He is a journalist and tech blogger for The Telegraph and Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media for Demos in conjunction with The University of Sussex. His primary areas of interest include the use of social media by political movements and law enforcement agencies and internet culture, the dark net and crypto-currencies. Bartlett is also the author of The Dark Net Inside the Digital Underworld.

Matthew Goodwin is a writer and speaker known for his work on British European politics, populism, Brexit and elections. He is Professor of Politics at Rutherford College, University of Kent, and Senior Visiting Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House. For more information you can visit here.

Speakers

Khadija Ismayilova is an award-winning investigative journalist who will be joining us by video link from Azerbaijan to discuss her stories, and the government’s response to them. She has been repeatedly jailed, harassed and defamed, but has continued to expose the financial dealings of her country’s ruling family.

Rebecca Vincent is the UK Bureau Director for Reporters Without Borders, known internationally as Reporters Sans Frontières. She is a human rights activist, writer, and former US diplomat. She has worked with a wide range of international and Azerbaijani NGOs, and has published widely on human rights issues.

Baroness Helena Kennedy QC is a legendary barrister, who was worked for dozens of campaigns over the decades. Last year, she introduced the Sergei Magnitsky amendments in the House of Lords, which seek to restrict visas to those credibly accused of gross human rights abuses.

Grace Gao

Grace Gao is daughter to Gao Zhisheng – a prominent Chinese human rights lawyer who is best known for his work defending Christians, Falun Gong adherents, and other vulnerable social groups. As a result of his work on ‘sensitive’ cases and his open letters to Chinese political leaders, he was subject to numerous incidences of enforced disappearance and torture before being convicted of ‘inciting to subvert state power’. After three years in prison, he was released on 7 August 2014 with serious health problems, and has been under effective house arrest. Since mid August 2017, he has been missing again. Gao has authored a comprehensive report detailing human rights abuses and related social issues in China in the year 2016. This is the first comprehensive human rights commentary written by a human rights lawyer still living in China and his commentary covers a wide range of human rights abuses, including violations of the right to freedom of religion or belief, abuses in Tibet and Xinjiang and the situation of lawyers and human rights defenders. Grace has worked tirelessly, raising awareness of her father’s situation and wider human rights issues in China.

Angela Gui

Angela Gui is the daughter of the Hong Kong bookseller Gui Minhai who is believed to have been abducted by Chinese agents in Thailand in late 2015. Gui was one of the five men who vanished in a spate of incidents known as the Causeway Bay Bookstore Disappearances.  It is believed he was targeted due to his work as a publisher specialising in books critical of the Chinese Communist Party.  Gui resurfaced months later in a detention centre in China, and was made to publicly confess to crimes on Chinese state television.  There has been no presentation of charges or conclusive evidence for his alleged crimes.  Angela is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, and has been campaigning for her father’s release since he went missing. You can read her article in The Guardian here.

Isabel Hilton (Chair)

Isabel Hilton is a London-based international journalist and broadcaster. She studied at the Beijing Foreign Language and Culture University and at Fudan University in Shanghai before taking up a career in written and broadcast journalism, working for The Sunday Times, The Independent, The Guardian, and the New Yorker. In 1992 she became a presenter of the BBC’s flagship news program, “The World Tonight,” then BBC Radio Three’s cultural program “Night Waves.” She is a columnist for The Guardian and her work has appeared in the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Granta, the New Statesman, El Pais, Index on Censorship, and many other publications. She is the author and co-auothor of several books and is founder and editor of chinadialogue.net, a non-profit, fully bilingual online publication based in London, Beijing, and Delhi that focuses on the environment and climate change.

Ben Bland

Ben Bland is the South China correspondent for the Financial Times, currently working out of Hong Kong. Bland is the author of the recently published Generation HK – an exploration into the youth in Hong Kong, from activists, artists, writers and journalists, and the encroaching threat on their freedom of speech from the mainland. Bland has been a correspondent in Asia for almost a decade. Before Hong Kong he was based in both Indonesia and Vietnam.

Featured photo: A protestor is wrapped up with rope during a march calling for the release of missing booksellers in Hong Kong’s Mighty Current Publishing house, January 10, 2016.

The craft of drawing has an important role to play in shining a spotlight on the people and places left unseen.

Artist and journalist Molly Crabapple joined an audience at the Frontline Club on Wednesday 6 April to discuss the unique purpose of her art in uncovering injustice and activism around the world. She also held a book signing session for her recently released memoir Drawing Blood, a colourful mix of autobiographical writing and illustrations.

How to draw censorship, how to draw the unseen? Great talk by @mollycrabapple at @FrontlineClub

— Veronique Mistiaen (@VeroMistiaen) April 6, 2016

Starting out as a model and artist in the sex industry, Crabapple has gone on to draw and report from Guantanamo Bay, Syria, the West Bank, Iraqi Kurdistan, and became a crucial voice during New York’s Occupy Movement in 2011. Long-time friend and journalist Natasha Lennard joined Crabapple to chair the discussion, describing her as “a crucial voice of our time, in a moment when journalism is in flux and open for necessary experimentation.” Lennard began by asking her motivations for using art for journalistic purposes.

“Photojournalists, they went into the world and captured everything, captured a story, they captured all these people and all these places,” Crabapple replied. “And I thought, my god, we artists used to do that before the camera came. The camera stole the image-making power from us. And I wanted to do that too.”

Her first assignment as a journalist was in 2013, when she visited Guantanamo Bay to document the detention centre and its inmates. Later that year, she was shortlisted for a Frontline Award for her stark portrayal of the prison, and the anonymous figures locked within its walls.

By Molly Crabapple

“Guantanamo is the most visually censored place on earth,” she explained. “Guantanamo is a place that if you were a photographer, your camera would be rifled through by a soldier at the end of every single session. But… I was able to draw Guantanamo Bay in a way that a photographer cannot photograph it. Not only that, but to draw the censorship itself. To make it explicit.”

Continuing on the theme of censorship, the duo turned to Crabapple‘s work with a Syrian journalist in Raqqa in 2015. She created a series of illustrations from photographs sent from Syria for Vanity Fair showing daily life under ISIS rule, areas too dangerous for most photojournalists to access.

“One of the projects that I’m proudest of was this project I did with a young Syrian writer named Marwan Hisham,” Crabapple elaborated. “I wanted to take images of daily life from ISIS-held territory and not the usual gory images of severed heads that we see on the news. Images of children going through the trash trying to find something to sell, or images of families on breadlines. Images of just daily prosaic life there. I wanted to, with my own skills as an artist, imbue them with craft and all the attention and time that a photojournalist would normally view something with.”

By Molly Crabapple

One audience member asked, given the traumatic and sometimes horrifying nature of the material she was dealing with, how drawing Syria had affected her.

Crabapple replied: “I am completely in awe of courage, of Syrian journalists working in the field, and the intense risks that they take… No one even cares if they die. It’s staggering and I feel a sense of shame. That’s how it transforms me, it gives me a sense of shame because in many ways my collaborators are better than me.”

Throughout the evening, many people in the audience expressed gratitude to Crabapple for her work, adding that it encouraged them to explore politics, human vulnerability and activism through art. After thanking her, one audience member asked Crabapple how she would imagine an ideal world.

“I think we are facing a fundamental challenge to the idea of borders,” Crabapple responded. “I think with the internet and the way people interact globally, that the way people are chained if they have ‘poor-world passports’, despite these global interactions that they have… I think that cannot stand. The ‘First World’ is going to have a choice– to either be part of the rest of the world, which they’ve often been exploiting… or they can engage in massive violence to keep the rest of the world out. I fear very desperately that they’re going to choose the second. But a small step toward making the world better might be them choosing the first.”

Documentary films often generate empathy in audiences, illuminating new perspectives and activating powerful emotions, but what happens next? How can empathy created by effective storytelling fuel action?

A panel of filmmakers and industry professionals will come together to discuss how they’ve carried their messages beyond the screen to incite engagement from viewers and response to social issues and injustices. Subjects to be discussed include storytelling methods for inspiring action, building campaigns through multimedia platforms, and engaging with the journalistic community.

Chaired by:
Sarah Mosses, CEO of Together Films, a new agency working with social issue film content to reach new audiences. She helps filmmakers craft Impact Distribution Campaigns to increase both their social impact, audience reach and revenue potential. As an award winning producer Sarah’s debut feature documentary They Will Have To Kill Us First had its World Premiere at SXSW 2015. Sarah is a mentor for Documentary Campus, Eso Doc, Sheffield DocFest, working with filmmakers to identify strategies and partners for their films.

The panelists:

Riddhi Jha is a UK Producer/Writer, educated at Royal Holloway, University of London. She started her career working in post-production and later began developing programmes for major UK television channels. Her debut in production was on a Channel 4 documentary ‘Why Don’t You Speak English?’ which followed the lives of those who had settled in the UK for the first time. Riddhi has since worked on the popular BBC television series ‘The Great British Bake Off’, has cast contributors and worked as Researcher for several productions for the BBC and Discovery and has scripted several commercials. “Riddhi came on board as an Associate Producer on India’s Daughter with the sort of commitment, energy and passion that a producer dreams of having at his/her side”, Leslee Udwin has said of her. Riddhi has a feature film in development as writer/producer – the story of a child bride.

Callum Macrae is a filmmaker, writer and journalist. An Emmy, BAFTA and Grierson nominee, his output has ranged from current affairs investigations to observational documentaries to polemics and he has filmed around the world, including Iraq, Sri Lanka, Japan, Haiti, Cote D’Ivoire, Uganda, Mali, and Sudan on subjects ranging from international and civil conflict to sex-workers rights.  He headed the Channel 4 team nominated in 2013 for a Nobel Peace Prize for their work on Sri Lanka which culminated in his feature documentary, No Fire Zone.  The product of a three year investigation, No Fire Zone is credited with playing a key role in convincing the UN Human Rights Council in March 2014 to launch a major international war crimes investigation into the events in the closing stages of the Sri Lankan Civil War.

Patrick Hurley is Distribution Manager at Dogwoof, a leading film distributor and world sales agent specialising in high-profile feature-length documentaries. Primarily responsible for theatrical-release campaigns and audience-building, Patrick has worked on over 60 cinema releases for documentaries in the UK over the past four years. For this discussion, Patrick will share insights from Dogwoof’s campaign for Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s Blackfish for which Dogwoof handled UK distribution, international sales plus website and social media.  Released in 2013, Blackfish has become a worldwide phenomenon, achieving an immense global audience and instigating a major impact on Sea World’s admissions and reputation for keeping orcas in captivity. Patrick will discuss how Dogwoof positioned and marketed the film to a broad audience while simultaneously leveraging support from key activist partners.

Meet Kisilu Musya, a Kenyan farmer and father of eight children, living at the front line of our changing climate. Through Kisilu’s poignant video diary and director Julia Dahr’s observational footage, we follow Kisilu and the Musya family through their day-to-day life over three years. We experience their struggle against the extreme storms and increasing droughts that threaten to destroy their home and ruin the crops that provide their food.

This personalised narrative documents a grassroots environmental awareness movement, as Kisilu determines to inform his community of tactics to help prepare their homes and crops for extreme weather.

Kisilu is an intimate portrait of a tightly knit family and one innovative and impassioned man battling the impacts of climate change to create a better future for his local community.

Kisilu: The Climate Diaries was awarded the Student Award at the 2015 One World Media Awards and will be broadcast on Al Jazeera Witness on 2 December 2015.

Director: Julia Dahr
Production Company: Banyak Films
Producer: Hugh Hartford
Runtime: 60′
Year: 2015
Country: Norway

The screening on Monday 14 September at the Frontline Club lived up to its bold name. How to Change The World, directed by Jerry Rothwell, journeys to the beginnings of the environmental movement and organisation, Greenpeace. As heartwarming as it is harrowing, the film is an homage to non-violent activism. From the bomb tests of Amchitka to whale and seal poaching in Alaska, How To Change The World chronicles the journey of a small group of friends in Vancouver who attempted to do just that. The film’s executive producer Stewart Le Marechal joined the Frontline Club audience for a discussion following the screening.

Stewart Le Marechal

Comprised mainly of archive footage from the 1970s, the documentary also includes present day interviews with the eclectic founding members of Greenpeace. These two elements are bound together by the writings of Bob Hunter – former journalist and reluctant leader of the group – which provide narration throughout.

Le Marechal spoke of the scale of their project over the eight years it took to develop: “In the archive in Amsterdam there were 15,000 cans of film and 50 hours of audio. What was kind of amazing was that a lot of this stuff has not been looked at for 40 years.”

The film chronicles the group of environmental activists as they venture boldly into the unknown, more often than not on a boat. Their lack of practical experience is made up for by no shortage of enthusiasm and an abundance of quirky humour – a clear advantage when it came to the essential appeal of their campaigns.

Although the film contains much humour, it does not shy away from including the power struggles that threatened to dissolve the movement. Hunter and his team are depicted both as vulnerable heroes exposed to  harrowing situations and as victims of their own sensitive group dynamic.

As the story developed, the depth of the rift between members became abundantly clear. Perhaps the biggest dilemma of all was whether or not to unite the Greenpeace groups that had sprouted up independently. Was simply bearing witness to the crimes they saw enough? For some yes, but for others it was only the motivation to go much, much further. For Paul Watson in particular, who describes himself as the “most extreme” of the group, this was certainly the case. He clashed with Patrick Moore, who would later come to denounce much of Greenpeace’s work.

When asked how the filmmakers managed to engage all the protagonists to participate in the interviews, Le Marechal said: “Even though they are at different ends of the spectrum, they all have a genuine love for Bob and wanting to honour him through this documentary.”

He emphasised their role as documentary filmmakers rather than dramatists, and commented that it was important “to represent all their voices so they could get a fair hearing.”

Le Marechal explained how impressed he was by the many interviews conducted: “These people that had done these crazy things 40 years ago, seeing how they felt about it now and how they see what they did.”

The Greenpeace movement coincided with the beginnings of electric communication, and Bob Hunter was immediately very perceptive of its power. He thus revolved his brand of activism around capturing a premeditated shot; with this he created “mind bombs.”

An audience member asked Le Marechal: “Do you or any of the other filmmakers have any goals or hopes that this will spark another resurgence of action?”

He responded that they primarily wanted to bring this story to life but, “Heck, if it inspires someone then that’s fantastic.”

The film ends with a look to the next generation of ecological activists inspired by Greenpeace, notably Hunter’s daughter who lovingly continues her father’s work.

Click here for more information about How to Change the World and upcoming screenings.

The Green Caravan Film Festival (GCFF) is a travelling festival of environmental and socially conscious films. It has toured Kuwait and Dubai for four years and now makes its London debut with screenings at the Frontline Club in west London and Rich Mix in east London.  The Frontline Club will be hosting three days of screenings showcasing the best of the festival, taking place in the evenings on 29-31 October.

The festival hopes to bring together a variety of audiences, filmmakers, NGOs and supporters that can discover, share and cooperate on the vital issues presented by the films in an atmosphere of inspired camaraderie and passion.

This year the festival has invited short films from the MENA region to enter an audience judged competition for the first time. The feature length films that make up 80% of the festival are carefully curated by GCFF to ensure that the stories being told and issues brought forward are done in an inspiring and well crafted way. The festival believes that the powerful medium of film can be a catalyst for positive change and we hope that it will entertain and challenge all those involved.

Website: www.thegreencaravan.com
Twitter: @gcfilmfest
Facebook: /gcfilmfest

Screening schedule:

Thursday 29 October, 7:00 PM – I Am the People

Friday 30 October, 8:00 PM – The Wanted 18

Saturday 31 October, 4:00 PM – Babushkas of Chernobyl

Saturday 31 October, 7:00 PM – Hadwin’s Judgement

Amer, 45, met Raghda, 40, in a Syrian prison cell 15 years ago. Over a number of months they communicated through a tiny hole they had secretly made in the wall. They fell in love and, following their release, married and started a family together.

This film tells the poignant story of their family torn apart by the tyrannical Assad dictatorship. Filming began in Syria in 2009, prior to the wave of revolutions and ongoing changes in the Middle East. At the time, Raghda was a political prisoner and Amer was caring for their young children alone. McAllister filmed in the thriving heart of the Yarmouk Camp in Damascus – now an infamous news story as the Assad regime blocked all aid and food to its inhabitants.

This intimate family portrait probes to understand why people are literally dying for change in the Arab world. As Raghda is released from prison, filmmaker Sean McAllister himself is arrested for filming and the political pressure around all activists intensifies. The family flee to Lebanon, and then to France where they are given political asylum in the sleepy town of Albi, where they now watch the revolution from afar and wait for the fall of Assad.

However, in exile Raghda’s mental heath suffers. We see their new life in France develop, but the war is now between them. In finding the freedom they fought so hard for, their relationship is beginning to fall apart.

A Syrian Love Story won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2015 Sheffield International Documentary Festival.

Directed by: Sean McAllister
Country: UK/France/Lebanon/Syria
Running time: 80′