2. October 2024

ICT4Peace congratulates the Zurich Film Festival (ZFF) for its 20th Anniversary and is grateful to have been its partner for many years.

We at ICT4Peace believe that Cinema has the potential to promote peace by raising awareness of global issues, fostering empathy, and encouraging social change. It can expose the harsh realities of conflict and injustice, compelling viewers to reflect and engage in peacebuilding efforts.

By humanizing struggles and challenging stereotypes, cinema fosters understanding across cultures and perspectives. It also has the power to inspire activism and potentially facilitate healing in post-conflict societies, offering a vision of hope. Ultimately, cinema can be a transformative force for promoting peace and driving positive social change worldwide.

That is why ICT4Peace has engaged since 2013 in cooperation with two major Zurich Film Festivals: The Zurich Film Festival (ZFF) and the Human Rights Film Festival Zurich (HRFF).

In particular, we are happy to have been co-organising since 2013 the legendary ongoing Zurich Summit ICT4Peace Charity Tennis Tournament together with Viviana Vezzani, Karl Spörri, Christian Jungen, Reta Guetg, Daniela Engler und Jean de Meuron of the ZFF team, which takes place during the Zurich Summit.

More close to the mandate of ICT4Peace, we are proud to have co-organised since 2018 new ZFF program sections, like the “Hashtag #big data”, “#HashtagSpeaking the Truth” and “ZFF Talks”, together with Karl Spörri, Christian Jungen, Annina Veith and Aurel Graf of the ZFF Team. In these sections of the Festival we co-organised screenings, panel discussions and Q&A on Films and Documentaries, such as Dragonfly Eyes by Xu Bing, ‘Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World’, a film by Hans Pool or the The Dissident by Bryan Fogel to honour Jamal Khashoggi. These schreenings were accompanied by moderated high-level panel discussions.

ICT4Peace is also proud to have cooperated since the beginning with Sacha Lara Bleuler, the co-founder of the Zurich Human Rights Film Festival (HRFF).

Since 2015, the Human Rights Film Festival Zurich takes place each year on the occasion of the International Day of Human Rights on 10 December. The programme reflects a variety of human rights themes in different geographic and social contexts, and ICT4Peace Foundation has from the Festival’s inception, been an NGO partner.

For instance, after screening The Look of Silence in 2016, after which a Skype video conversation was facilitated with the film’s director, Joshua Oppenheimer, the Foundation in 2017 screened the award-winning and critically acclaimed documentary, ‘Black Code’. The Foundation’s Special Advisor Sanjana Hattotuwa engaged in conversations with Prof. Ron Deibert, the Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto after the screening of the film.

Please find here the full text with the list and posts on the cooperation with the two Film Festivals in Zurich.