Lugano's human rights film festival honours Rosine Mbakam

The Film festival diritti umani Lugano reaches its thirteenth edition. It will run from 11 to 18 October and will bring together thematic screenings, forums and conversations. The international competition section for feature films remains.

The Human Rights Award for Authors goes this year to Cameroonian director Rosine Mbakam. The festival will screen «Mambar Pierrette», which premiered at Cannes, along with other works of hers.

Co-directors Antonio Prata and Margherita Cascio presented the edition as «a new and indispensable challenge», stressing the festival's need to engage with contemporary realities that demand commitment.

A cinema that starts in everyday spaces

Mbakam works on a shifting boundary between documentary and fiction. Her films address the legacies of colonialism, migration, systemic racism and the exploitation that affects African women and diaspora communities.

The citation speaks of a path that is «coherent and necessary, capable of uniting cinematic research and civic commitment». Her cinema turns everyday spaces into places for observing class, gender and power relations, centring Cameroonian and African women who face patriarchy, violence and economic precarity.

One distinctive feature of her method concerns point of view. Mbakam rejects the Western, victimising gaze directed at the African continent. Instead she documents experience from community perspectives, in which the people filmed take an active part in building the story.

The full programme will be organised around thematic screenings, forums and conversations with the audience, following the formula the festival has settled into over the years.