Beyond Suffering, Towards Justice? Human Rights Films and the Critique of Humanitarian Culture

This article is an exploration of cultural codes of humanitarianism and human rights in feature-length films. The aim of the article is to contribute to the study of mediated human rights, which has been very little developed in comparison with work on humanitarian media and culture. The article draws on close readings of films and interviews with filmmakers and curators of human rights film festivals. The analysis is organized into themes that are prominent in critiques of humanitarianism and existing work on human rights films: victims, temporality, scale, and bearing witness. While there can be no definitive list of the essential differences between humanitarianism and human rights, there are differences as well as commonalities in the cultural codes of human rights films and humanitarian media. It is important to be aware of how mediated human rights represent alternatives to the humanitarian imaginary dominant in the West.