The 5th Film Festival for Women’s Rights, Fiwom

From Oct. 5^th to 9^th, a special film festival took place. Every year, ‘Fiwom presents a wide variety of movies that reveal women’s rights issues around the world. It was initially held by Korea Women’s Hotline in 2006 and its primary goal is to inform people of the severity of violation of women’s rights and encourage them to pay more attention to women who are suffering from the abuse of human rights in daily life.

There are a number of film festivals for women’s rights other than ‘Fiwom’ such as the International Women’s Film Festival, Women’s film festival in Incheon, and the Network of Asian Women’s Film Festivals (NAWFF), and Samsung International Women’s Film Festival. However, what is special about ‘Fiwom Festival’ was that it offered the audience a great opportunity to communicate with directors and talk about a lot of issues related women’s rights.

Although the scale of ‘Fiwom’ is not that magnificent, it’s a great event for people who have a deep interest in women’s rights. What’s more, even high school students were allowed to make an attempt to submit a movie about the themes the festival assigned and participate as a director. For instance, a young director named ‘Ji-whe Moon’ who is currently attending Korean Animation High School was one of the directors of the film festival.

In addition, 2011 Fiwom had more various international films than previous ones. More directors from different countries participated in and from honor killing in Iran to sexual harassment in the workplace, a broader range of women’s rights issues were included in films.

Several films were based on true stories and social issues.

Let me introduce one of them. The film called ’Paradise’ is about an orphan girl who enters into prostitution in order to make a living and raise her younger brother. This young girl represents a lot of today’s orphans and neglected children who do immoral things for money and get no protection from the society they live in. The fantasy and paradoxical symbols the director used are to remind the audience of hellish reality of orphans. This movie is a must-see since many teenagers do not pay much attention to them but mostly care much more about their grades or academic career.  This film and also other films about various social issues about youth probably motivate a lot of teenagers to pay more attention to those who are in need.