Sep.19th 2025 – Oct.12nd 2025 in Taipei
Sep.22nd 2025 – Sep. 28th 2025 in Kaohsiung
The Earth Is Speaking — Did You Hear It?
In recent years, the world has been struck time and again by extreme climate events—scorching heatwaves, relentless wildfires, sudden torrential rains, and devastating floods. These crises have not only unsettled the environments we once took for granted but have also begun eroding the very foundations of human survival. Climate disasters are no longer distant warnings confined to scientific data or media reports; they have already entered our everyday reality. As humanity struggles to defend its basic right to survival, we must also confront a fundamental question: how should we redefine the relationship between humans and nature? And should the environment itself be recognized as a rights-bearing entity?
The 2025 Taiwan International Human Rights Film Festival adopts “The Earth Is Speaking—Did You Hear It?” as its annual theme, centering on two curatorial strands: Environmental Rights and Human Rights Panorama. Through a diverse selection of films from across the globe, audiences will be immersed in stories set within varied cultural contexts, witnessing how communities confront the challenges of climate change and environmental deprivation. At the same time, these works invite us to reflect on how individuals and collectives rebuild their lives and reclaim dignity amidst disaster and struggle.
This year’s festival opens with a powerful dual showcase: The Blue Trail and Meeting with Pol Pot, films that embody the two thematic axes of Environmental Rights and Human Rights Panorama, launching the program with striking resonance.
From Brazil, The Blue Trail examines the ecological crisis and cultural narratives of the Amazon rainforest. Through a poetic visual language and deliberate narrative rhythm, the director reveals how pristine nature is appropriated, deconstructed, and ultimately consumed in the currents of capitalism and globalization.
Meeting with Pol Pot is directed by Rithy Panh, the Cambodian-French master filmmaker renowned for his works on the Khmer Rouge regime. Drawing from his own traumatic experiences, Panh revisits the brutality of 1970s Cambodia, tracing how ideology gradually morphed into authoritarian violence and culminated in large-scale humanitarian catastrophe. Interweaving dramatic reenactments with archival records, the film is not only a meditation on history but also a contemporary allegory of human fragility and the pursuit of truth. This year, Rithy Panh will also be a distinguished international guest of the festival, sharing his profound experiences and stories with our audiences.
Through the cinematic journey curated by the Taiwan International Human Rights Film Festival, we sincerely invite you to pause and listen to the voices rising from the depths of the Earth. They may come as the whispers of the rainforest, the dripping of melting ice, the cries of fractured soil, or the silence within a refugee camp. Are we willing to confront them? Are we prepared to respond?
In 2025, let us gather before the screen to pursue, together, a path toward coexistence between humanity and the Earth.
