The International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights Geneva (FIFDH) has announced the twelve documentary projects selected for the 2027 Impact Lab, the training strand of its Impact Days programme for professionals. The teams are coached online over several months, then pitch their campaigns in Geneva from 7 to 9 March 2027 and meet international impact professionals and human rights organisations.
Six projects concern Europe. In #ClickRevolution, Anja Strelec (Croatia) follows the young influencer Nina as she leads an independent Gen Z list into the 2024 European Parliament elections. David Roland Warwick’s Smoking Shores (United Kingdom) finds a surfing community in the shadow of the country’s largest steelworks, and Linda Kallistová Jablonská’s Still Here (Czech Republic) accompanies the palliative care patient Zorka and her daughters Veronika and Bára. The Others, by Ofelia de Pablo and Javier Zurita (both Spain), looks at Almería, where migrant workers produce certified organic food and remain invisible and exploited. Dea Gjinovci (Switzerland) and Antoine Goldet (France) direct Sisters Act, about nuns who have formed an international network against sexual slavery between Africa and Europe. Javier Lovera’s ExCoded (Canada) meets people harmed by AI, the ‘excoded’, as facial recognition spreads into police work and immigration systems.
Two Indian productions deal with threatened ways of life. Rajani Mani’s Before the Feast centres on Vincent, an ageing farmer in Kochi’s salt marshes who protects a rare salt-tolerant rice as the seas rise. Vikram Singh’s Camels of the Sea sets swimming camels and nomadic caravans against extractive capitalism in a village on the frontline of India’s economic rise. Harde Samir’s Sara (Iraq) follows a Kurdish refugee girl who lost her right leg in a Turkish bombardment in northern Syria. She learns to walk again and expresses herself through art as her family seeks asylum in Europe.
Laura Dauden’s Justice in the Land of Fog (Brazil) follows a journalist in Colombia who investigates the judicial persecution of activists and a mother facing it first-hand. In The Displaced, by María José Calderón (Chile) and Samuel Pigott (United States), a Chilean woman displaced by Pinochet at the age of four fights to reclaim her land from a billionaire-owned ‘eco-reserve’. Kachi Benson’s The Road to Bama (Nigeria) tells of an intersex teenager who survived five years in captivity after being kidnapped by Boko Haram and married to one of its commanders, and who met prejudice even after the rescue.
More details can be found in the Impact Days online catalogue. Impact strategies and teasers follow in February. The FIFDH website introduces the selection committee.
