ISLAMABAD: The Embassy of Switzerland on Thursday hosted the opening of the third edition of the Human Rights Film Festival which included a screening of a documentary titled ‘Impasse’.

The Human Rights Film Festival commemorates the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with a campaign built on #StandUp4HumanRights which aims to engage broad audiences across the world and mobilize people for human rights.

Inaugurating the event, Director UN Information Centre Vittorio Cammarota said: “The documentaries are focused on human rights violations across the world, including migration, refugees, freedom of expression, human trafficking, child abuse and violence against others among others. The strength of this festival is the joint work of the partners who have grown considerably in number for this edition. And this year, we warmly welcome the Goethe-Institute and the Pakistan National Council of the Arts.”

Speaking at the event, Swiss Ambassador Thomas Kolly, said: “Cinema is an incredible means to transmit messages – even when one has read thousands of books, watching photographs, film, and movies connects hearts. Each country faces its own challenges, but cooperation is the key to tackle universal human right problems. Impasse [highlights] the human trafficking challenge we face in Switzerland and in some countries of Europe.”

Impasse — A Deadlock is a symbolically portrayed documentary by Elise Shubs, which sums up a phenomenon of worldwide significance: prostitution. The entire film, discusses prostitution in the form of a narrative and the unlikelihood of ascertaining the people in their accounts provides them with an astonishing power.

The documentary opened to a packed audience at the ambassador’s abode as the screen lit up with an incessant stream of cars rolling down dimly lit streets in time to the narrative of the protagonist of the film. The restrained photography confers the film an exceedingly powerful connotation.

Deprived of clichés and redundantly banal display of prostitution, Elise Shubs authentically delivers their stories along with the malice of their words, which transpire over mundane images.

Impasse embraces the suffering, doubts, dreams and hopes of four women, and is elusive of judgment and focuses entirely on comprehending how a person may end up in that place. Women, immigrants and mothers, who resolved to choose this path to escape poverty or support a family back home found themselves prisoners in a precarious human trafficking ring. Reluctantly, learning to accept their fate, each woman ascertained to live with the pain, submitting and offering themselves to the highest bidder while acknowledging that there may not be any escape.

Impasse, signifying the violation of human rights and the cruelty of the profession, demonstrates how devastating the consequences of it are on those involved. The documentary ends with a narrative of relentless hope for a better life and a dream to forget while acknowledging the brutality of their circumstance. It is simply, life stories that we would rather ignore, pushing them aside into a marginality we don’t want to deal with.

Published in Dawn, November 24th, 2017