On November 11 at 7 p.m., István Rév, Founding Director of Blinken OSA Archivum, will open the 22nd Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival at Trafó House of Contemporary Arts. Enikő Gyureskó, festival director, will give a welcoming speech. Tickets for the event are available.
This year's slogan for Verzió, "We Exist Together," invites us to think collectively: how can we live together amid the fractures, conflicts, and challenges of our world?
The opening film is the Sundance Special Jury Prize winner Coexistence, My Ass! a portrait of an Israeli-Palestinian stand-up comedian. After the screening, writer, publicist, and activist Kristóf Steiner will talk with producer Rachel Leah Jones. The conversation will be in English, with Hungarian interpretation provided.
COEXISTENCE, MY ASS! follows Israeli activist-comedian Noam Shuster Eliassi as she creates a comedy show by the same name. Shot over five tumultuous years, the film traces Noam’s personal, professional and political journey in tandem with the region’s steady deterioration. Raised in a bilingual Israeli-Palestinian village — the only intentionally integrated community in the country — Noam grows disillusioned with traditional peace activism. She pivots to stand-up and quickly attracts attention across the Middle East. But as her star rises, everything around her falls apart. With biting satire, Noam pushes her audiences to face difficult truths that aren't always funny but do remind us that another reality is possible.
István Rév is Professor of History and Political Science at the Central European University Budapest, and the Founding Director of Blinken OSA. He was a founding member in 1984 of the Danube Circle environmental organization, and is a past winner of the Right for Livelihood Award (the alternative Nobel Prize) of the Swedish Parliament. He has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a research fellow at the Getty Center in Los Angeles and at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. In 1995, he was the recipient of the New Europe Prize. He is a member of the Open Society Foundations’ Global Board. His scholarly interests include historical amnesia, memory, historical anthropology, and documentary traces of the past. His many publications include Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
Tickets are available: https://trafo.hu/en/programs/22_verzio_filmfesztival_nyitofilm
