Programme

Besides its thematic sections, the festival programme has two competition categories (the Main Competition and the Right to Know category). The winners of these competitions will be selected by two international juries. A special award for a film that contributes to the protection of human rights in a remarkable way will be also awarded by a jury under the honorary chairmanship of Václav Havel. Other awards that will be presented at the festival include the Czech Radio Award for the creative use of music and sound in a documentary film, the Students Jury Award for the best film in the One World for Students category, and the VŠEM Audience Award.

As is the case every year at the festival, we will be welcoming dozens of foreign guests. Most of these guests are directors, but we will also be hosting some of the protagonists from selected movies, who will attend debates immediately after the screening of their films.

From February 15^th to March 28^th, One World audience will have an opportunity to see selected documentaries online by streaming them at the website www.ceskatelevize.cz/jedensvet. Besides films made by some of last year’s jury members, we will also be showing movies that were successful in previous years of the festival, such as last year’s winning film Below Sea Level, as well as Japan – A Story of Love and Hate, and Barcelona or Die.

This year’s programme also won’t have any shortage of morning screenings for primary and secondary school students. Screenings will be held for primary and secondary schools in every town and city where the festival takes place.This year, we will be focusing more than we have in previous years on films that encourage young people to become actively involved in civic engagement.

The themes of films in this year’s One World for Children category include topics such as friendship and the family as well as global warming, autism, social exclusion and bullying. We have also included two Czech films in the list. One of these is The Way I See It – Pepa about a 14-year-old boy who has been hustling for money for himself and his unemployed parents since he was 7 years of age.

In our One World for Students category for older children, we have prepared a number of films with environmental themes, ranging from the life of indigenous populations to the devastation of the environment in Africa and the issue of national parks. For example, the latter topic is dealt with in the documentary A Place without People. This shows the extent to which the Maasai people have been affected by Western concepts of conservation and nature tourism, which have a negative impact on indigenous inhabitants who have lived in complete harmony with the wilderness for centuries.

Another film intended for schools is the extraordinarily powerful Orphans of Burma’s Cyclone, which was shot by two brave cameramen from the exile organisation Democratic Voice of Burma. This documentary is one of the few records of the consequences of the Cyclone Nargis catastrophe, which devastated Burma on 3 May 2008. It offers a unique account of the fates of several orphans whilst also capturing the everyday lives of ordinary people in one of the most brutal and tightly controlled regimes in the world, which is still not willing to help its population one year after the natural disaster.

Besides Prague, One World will also be held in the following towns and cities: Bílina (29 March – 2 April), Brno (23 – 30 March), České Budějovice (16 – 19 March), Děčín (8 – 10 April), Hradec Králové (12 – 16 April), Hrádek nad Nisou (22 – 23 March), Jablonec nad Nisou (22 – 25 March), Karlovy Vary (19 – 21 March), Kladno (17 – 20 March), Kralupy nad Vltavou (22 – 23 March), Libčice nad Vltavou (19 March), Liberec (22 – 28 March), Mělník (25 – 27 March), Mikulov (17 – 19 March), Mladá Boleslav (22 – 26 March), Nový Bor (19 – 21 March), Olomouc (22 – 31 March), Opava (22 – 26 March), Ostrava (22 – 27 March), Pardubice (22 – 27 March), Plzeň (15 – 26 March), Polička (23 – 25 March), Rožnov pod Radhoštěm (29 – 31 March), Tábor (18 – 20 March and 22 March), Tanvald (29 – 30 March), Teplice (15 – 18 March), Třinec (25 – 31 March), Ústí nad Labem (15 – 20 March) and Ústí nad Orlicí (7 – 10 April).