The anniversary section Films That Changed the World will present films whose impact extended far beyond the cinema. The section comprises thirteen films that succeeded in influencing public debate and transforming it into action, changing legislation or fundamentally altering the way society viewed a particular issue.
“Can films change the world? We decided to take this question seriously and search across the past century for films that actually managed to do so. They include films that helped free people who had been unjustly imprisoned, led to changes in regulations, contributed to funding for neglected regions or helped change laws. These are not ideological films, but films that stand on the side of ordinary people – individuals, communities and society as a whole,” says festival director Marek Hovorka.
The section will include one of the most influential television documentaries in the history of American journalism, Harvest of Shame (1960). Producer and reporter David Lowe, together with Edward R. Murrow, exposed the appalling living and working conditions of migrant agricultural workers in the United States. At the time, these workers had no legal guarantee of a minimum wage, restrictions on working hours, healthcare or protection of children from labour. The film sparked a nationwide debate and accelerated the consideration of agricultural labour legislation. Twenty-two months after it was broadcast, President Kennedy signed the Migrant Health Act, which enabled federal funding for a network of clinics and healthcare services for migrant workers’ families. In 1967, some agricultural workers became entitled to the minimum wage for the first time.
In S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003), Cambodian director Rithy Panh brings eleven former staff members and two survivors back to the S-21 prison, where most prisoners had been tortured to death. Together they revisit torture sites, prison records and registration photographs. The film keeps its focus on the perpetrators: Panh has them repeat the routine gestures of everyday cruelty and describe how they became part of a killing machine. Made almost a quarter of a century after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, whose rule claimed approximately two million lives, the film documented their crimes and captured specific confessions by perpetrators. Cambodia passed legislation establishing a special tribunal to prosecute Khmer Rouge crimes while the film was being made.
The Czechoslovak contribution to the section is Children Without Love (1963), directed by Czech-German filmmaker Kurt Goldberger and made in collaboration with child psychologist Zdeněk Matějček. The film openly addressed the psychological deprivation experienced by children living in collective institutions in the socialist state of the time, particularly weekly nurseries and infant institutions. Their expansion was linked to efforts to bring women into the workforce on a large scale. The film triggered an extraordinary public debate and contributed to the extension of maternity leave and the regulation of women’s night work.
Ji.hlava audiences will also have the opportunity to see Frederick Wiseman’s landmark American documentary Titicut Follies (1967), an unflinching look at the inhumane conditions and treatment of inmates at a correctional institution for mentally ill offenders. Wiseman’s debut raised fundamental questions about the treatment of people in psychiatric institutions and became the subject of a lengthy legal battle over censorship. The film had a significant influence on debate about the need to reform psychiatric care in the United States, as well as on discussions about documentary ethics.
Noriaki Tsuchimoto’s groundbreaking Minamata: The Victims and Their World (1971) captures the lives of people affected by mercury poisoning in the Minamata Bay area. Black-and-white images of patients and their relatives are accompanied primarily by their own accounts. By the time filming began, Minamata disease had already shaped life in the region for almost fifteen years, yet the state had still not acknowledged responsibility, while residents distrusted the media. The film also captures the emergence of the “one-share movement,” which allowed patients and bereaved relatives to attend the general meeting of the Chisso Corporation. The movement contributed to a 1973 ruling that held the company responsible.
A remarkable behind-the-scenes view of workers’ unrest is offered by Be Seeing You (1968), directed by Chris Marker and Mario Marret. In December 1967, nine months after a major strike, they filmed interviews with workers and trade unionists at the Rhodiacéta textile factory in French Besançon. After seeing the film, however, workers criticised it for emphasising their grievances at the expense of a concrete programme and for overlooking both women’s work and the trade-union organising that had preceded the strike. Marker and Marret responded by developing the idea of militant cinema made by workers themselves. They trained twenty workers in filmmaking, leading to the creation of the Medvedkin Groups, which produced around a dozen films about their own working environment by 1974.
Now regarded as a classic of documentary cinema, American filmmaker Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988) examines the 1976 murder of a Dallas police officer and exposes the mechanisms behind a miscarriage of justice. Through interviews, police and court records, and Philip Glass’s minimalist score, the film assembles conflicting versions of a single night and shows how manipulation, unreliable testimony and institutional pressure for a swift resolution contributed to the conviction of Randall Dale Adams. Evidence uncovered during the making of the film called both witness testimony and the prosecution’s case into question, helped reopen proceedings and increased public pressure for a review of the verdict. In March 1989, a Texas appeals court overturned Adams’s conviction, and he was released after twelve years in prison.
This year’s Ji.hlava visual identity also reflects the idea behind the Films That Changed the World section. The motif of a circle transforming into expanding waves evokes the idea that every action can have an impact far beyond its original place and time – just like films whose effects continue to spread beyond the cinema screen. The section is supported by Jan Barta’s Pale Fire Capital.
