Growing up in Romania, Alexandra Cotofana began working with the One World Romania human rights documentary film festival in 2007.
After years of molding a community around human rights and documentary film, Cotofana said a civil uprising began right after she left Romania in 2013 for IU’s Anthropology Ph.D program.
Seeing the effect documentary films have on civil society, Cotofana took her experiences and launched the In Light Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, which celebrates its second year this weekend.
“People were in the streets for months, in the winter, asking for their rights,” she said of the Romanian uprising in an email interview. “Many of the protesters were people I had seen year after year in cinemas, coming to see and discuss documentary films.”
Last year’s inaugural festival took place exclusively at the IU Cinema. This year’s festival has expanded to seven films and several activities taking place at the IU Cinema, the Fine Arts Theater, she said, the Hoagy Carmichael Room and more.
The two main goals of the In Light Film Festival are to bring award-winning documentaries to IU’s campus and to organize a series of academic events surrounding the films, Cotofana said.
Of the seven films, six are from 2015 and one is from 2014.
Cotofana said the films they choose typically premiere at major film festivals the same year, which provides Bloomington’s audience topical issues worth discussing.
This year’s schedule includes master classes, lectures and discussions with many guests, including director Chad Gracia and Artem Ryzhykov, director and cinematographer for “The Russian Woodpecker,” Joel Pett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist, and more.
“A big chunk of our budget goes to bringing directors and guests on campus for most of our screenings,” Cotofana said. “We believe this is essential for giving our audience the full experience of documentary where context is very important.”
Although the film festival began last year as an effort by graduate and undergraduate students advised by faculty, Cotofana said the festival has quickly found supporters and sponsors in many groups and faculty across campus.
With more than a dozen individual groups sponsoring the festival, she said anthropology professor Sarah Phillips was perhaps her biggest supporter in starting the event.
After their early success, Cotofana said she and her team quickly realized their festival was becoming a valuable resource for the Bloomington community.
“Last year, we had almost 500 people come to our screenings, which is humbling for a film festival organized by students who teach, take courses, exams and write dissertations on the side too — some even have social lives,” she said.
The festival is the only human rights film festival in Indiana. Likewise, Cotofana said it is one of few in the world that takes place exclusively on a campus.
Due to the student-filled staff, she said the festival is organized with other students in mind.
“It is not only a film festival, but a hub for academic events, for film scholars and for young researchers interested in pursuing a career in documentary film as an alternative to academic publishing,” she said. “Because of ILFF being all these things, it couldn’t have found a better home than the IU Bloomington campus.”
With Bloomington being an academic community, she said documentary films are an eye-opening tool to help students and community members look at social issues they wouldn’t otherwise be aware of.
“ILFF manages to bring new, highly awarded and acclaimed international documentaries, together with their filmmakers, to a small town in Indiana,” she said. “That’s pretty amazing. I believe documentary films are the ideal way for people to find out about how other cultures lead their lives elsewhere.”
Although there aren’t many film festivals like the In Light Film Festival, Cotofana said she believes the Midwest has potential for organizing people in groups related to human rights and civil society.
Cotofana said she is optimistic about the festival’s future and hopes to see more festivals pop up around the country.
“I encourage students at all the universities to take advantage of the great resources on campus and engage different academic audiences and the community in something like ILFF, that is fun, eye-opening and educational,” she said. “I believe film festivals have the potential to change entire generations, and I hope ILFF will be at IU for many years to come.”
