Competition 2022

Who will receive the 2022 Willy Brandt Documentary Award for Freedom and Human Rights?

This year, ten filmmakers are once again hoping to win the renowned Willy Brandt Documentary Award for Freedom and Human Rights. With their documentaries, they are participating in this year’s Human Rights Film Festival Berlin competition. The prize is endowed with EUR 3,000, which has been donated by the Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt Foundation. The international jury will select one of ten documentaries for its outstanding content and artistic achievements.

The Willy Brandt Documentary Film Prize for Freedom and Human Rights was awarded for the first time at the 2019 Human Rights Film Festival Berlin. That year, Peter Brandt, son of former Federal Chancellor and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Willy Brandt, presented the prize to Russian director Askold Kurov. Kurov received the award for his impressive 2018 documentary ‘Novaya’ about the editorial board of Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia’s first and now last independent newspapers. The 2020 laureate was the Kenyan documentary ‘Softie’ by director Sam Soko about the political activist Boniface Mwangi and his wife Njeri Mwangi. Last year, director Zahavi Sanjavi received the award for his moving film ‘Imad’s Childhood’ (2021) about five-year-old Imad, who has spent more than half his life in IS captivity and is returning to his Yazidi family.

‘We need that level of emotions that documentaries trigger in us to really understand and internalise things.’
Peter Brandt auf der Bühne des HRFFB 2021
Peter Brandt

The Willy Brandt Documentary Film Award for Freedom and Human Rights is intended to commemorate Willy Brandt’s achievements as Federal Chancellor and a Nobel Peace Prize-winner and to support outstanding film-makers whose work exemplifies Willy Brandt’s values: freedom, justice and solidarity.

Jury 2022: Martina Dase (Save the Children), Uli Edel (Director), Malte Mau (Bundeskanzler-Willy-Brandt-Stiftung), Edima Otuokon (Ladima Foundation) and  Hana Kulhankova (Institute of Documentary Film)

Competition 2022

A Story Of Bones

The remote island of St. Helena is best known for being where Napoleon spent his final years in exile and was ultimately buried. His grave is beautifully maintained and serves as the island's biggest…

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Backlash: Misogyny in the Digital Age

‘A few tweets and messages on the internet, what can you do?’ But is that whole truth? More than 40,000 sexist insults, rape and death threats, a montage of a decapitated woman’s head, footage of a…

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Bigger Than Us

Melati is 18 years old and has been fighting against plastic pollution in Indonesia since she was a child. On a journey around the world, she meets seven young activists. Like her, they are all…

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Children of the Enemy

Patricio is living through an unimaginable nightmare. He lost his daughter when she and her husband joined the IS in Syria, before they were both killed in combat in 2019. Now Patricio’s underaged…

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Eskape

“The Hill of Death” – this was the name given to the refugee camp Khao-I-Dang on the border of Cambodia and Thailand. Hundreds of thousands of people were once stranded there as they fled certain…

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Beyond Revolution – Fighting for Democracy

In Ukraine, they are called the ‘three musketeers’: together, journalists Svitlana Zalishchuk, Serhiy Leshchenko and Mustafa Nayyem are fighting for democracy on the Maidan. When the revolution comes…

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Outside

Ukraine 2014. A boy runs around the front lines of the Maidan uprising. In his hand is a paving stone, his gaze is full of rage. This is how he suddenly becomes a face of the revolution. But behind…

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Sing, Freetown

Sorious Samura and Charlie Haffner are fed up. War, disease, poverty: it’s always the same images and negative news that shape public perceptions of Africa – and that in no way do the continent…

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Stop Filming Us but Listen

A woman covers her face with a scarf – she does not want to be filmed – but the camera continues to point at her. This scene is from a documentary by a Dutch film team. Their aim is to portray life…

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The Oil Machine

Toothbrushes, soft toys, headphones, playing cards, scissors, buttons – everything contains oil. Oil that comes, for example, from the British North Sea, where there are still several billion litres…

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3. OCTOBER 2022