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IX Human Rights Film Festival of Barcelona

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The IX Human Rights Film Festival with the central in Barcelona and done also in NYC and Paris is directed by Toni Navarro and organised by the Mirada Descubierta entity, remains faithful to a dual commitment: on the one hand, to promote and open up spaces for the dissemination and screening of cinematographic works dealing with the defence of human rights; and on the other hand to increase public awareness and boost respect for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights based on the dissemination of those works.

This ninth edition is backed by an unprecedented response to the organiser’s call to participate, showing itself in nearly 3,000 audiovisual works received from all round the world.
The inaugural ceremony will take place on Thursday 17 May at 8 pm, at the new headquarters of Filmoteca de Catalunya. The ceremony will include a screening for the first time in Spain of “The Whistleblower” directed by Larysa Kondracki.
The Festival will be presenting a total of 112 films, belonging to the genres of fiction, cartoons and documentaries, 100 of them divided for the purposes of competition into two official sections: the official section of full-length/feature films and the official section of short films.
The works entered for competition will be opting for the official prizes given by the organisers, “Best Short Film” and “Best Full-Length Film“. Outside of competition, the Festival will award two honorary prizes, the “Human Rights Cinema Festival Prize“, and the “Human Rights International Journalism Prize“. For their part, the entities Amnesty International and Survival International, will be granting a further two honorary prizes.
The programme is completed with a number of parallel activities such as specialist talks by leading national and international speakers, exhibitions concerning the world of human rights, and travelling exhibitions of the Festival organised internationally.
The closing ceremony will be held on Tuesday 22 May at the Cines Girona cineman in Barcelona, where there will take place the awards of the various prizes in each official competition section, as well as of the honorary prizes.

Will be held from 17 to 22 May 2012 at the following venues:

BARCELONA

Filmoteca de Catalunya. Pl. Salvador Seguí, s/n
Cinemes Girona. C/ de Girona, 173.
Institut Francès Barcelona. C/ Moià, 8.
Museu d’Història de Catalunya. Pl. Pau Vila, 3.
Fundació Casa del Tibet. C / Rosselló, 181.
FNAC Triangle. Pl. Catalunya, 4.
Centre de Cultura de Dones Francesca Bonnemaison. Sant Pere més Baix 7.
Palau Robert. Passeig de Gràcia, 107.

NEW YORK CITY

East Harlem presents. Poet’s Den Gallery, Poet’s Den Theater 309 East 108th Street Suite 1r. New York, NY 10029.

PARIS

Cinéma la Clef, 34 Rue Daubenton, 75005 Paris


Authors Explore American Immigrant Experience

Immigrants bring many things to the U.S., but their lasting contribution to the country has always been their children. The NPR series “Immigrants’ Children” looks at that legacy, telling the stories of those children and examining the issues they face.

Award-winning authors Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz and Samina Ali all came to this country as children — Danticat from Haiti, Diaz from the Dominican Republic, and Ali from India.

As part of NPR’s series on the children of immigrants, these three authors offer perspective on the transformation of immigrants in America as the next generation assimilates.

Edwidge Danticat’s most recent book, Brother, I’m Dying, is a memoir about her uncle’s tragic story of trying to immigrate to this country. Danticat has been in America since she was 12 when she lived with her family in a Haitian neighborhood of New York City. America has often been called a melting pot, but Danticat says that doesn’t mean children of immigrants will necessarily shed their cultural heritage.

Author Junot Diaz was born in the Dominican Republic. His Pulitzer-prize winning book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was praised for its vibrant prose and street-smart language, often in the Spanglish that surrounded Diaz growing up. For the Diaz family, the transformation of language was a big part of the immigrant experience.

Samina Ali, author of Madras on Rainy Days, was raised both in India and the U.S like the protagonist in her novel, Layla. Ali was once wedded to a stranger through an arranged marriage, and her parents would take her back to India every year in hopes of strengthening the bonds of her heritage. But she says it’s a struggle to maintain that continuity with her own children.

NPR is a public American radio station and a thriving media organization at the forefront of digital innovation which creates and distributes award-winning news, information, and music programming to a network of 959 independent stations. Through them, NPR programming reaches 26.4 million listeners every week.


The Nobel Case for Immigration

“The Nobel Case for Immigration – Keeping our eyes on the prize when it comes to immigration policy”, an article by Ryan Young and Alex Nowrasteh.

Only 1 in 20 people on earth live in America. But Americans won 4 of 11 Nobel prizes this year. Last year, it was 8 of 9. Many of those American laureates are immigrants. Today, about 1 in 8 Americans are foreign-born, but 1 in 4 American Nobel laureates since 1901 are foreign-born. Immigrants, it seems, are chronic overachievers. America would benefit by letting more in.

A third of Silicon Valley’s scientists and engineers are immigrants. Forty percent of Ph.D. scientists working in the U.S. are foreign-born. They are sources of innovation, progress, and — not to be ignored — jobs. If our immigration laws allowed more high-skilled workers into the country, the result would be faster growth and higher employment.

America has a long waiting list of eager high-skilled immigrants. Some of them may be future Nobel laureates.

But current immigration laws are keeping them out the country. The H-1B visa for skilled immigrants is capped at 85,000. Demand is far higher than that in most years. In non-recession years, those 85,000 spots are typically filled in a single day.

The quota on highly skilled immigrants is economically costly. Genius-level intellects are missing out on the chance to flower at the world’s best universities. They’re also missing out on one of the world’s best entrepreneurial environments. The world is missing out on their lost achievements. And Americans are missing out on cutting-edge jobs in high-tech fields. Consumers lose out on products that are never invented.

A 2005 World Bank study found that foreign graduate students working in the United States file an enormous number of patents. A quarter of international patents filed from the U.S. in 2006 named a non-U.S. citizen working in the U.S. as the inventor or co-inventor. Immigrants — some of whom our immigration bureaucracy refuses to recognize — are responsible for an outsized portion of today’s rapid technological advancement.

Fortunately for America, some of these high achievers are willing to break the law to be here. According to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Immigration Statistics, there are almost 300,000 illegal Indian immigrants in the U.S. Many of them arrived here on H-1B or student visas and have overstayed their legal residency in hopes of getting a green card.

The non-partisan National Foundation for American Policy reports that for every H-1B visa issued, U.S. technology firms increase their employment by five workers. It is a remarkable policy failure that almost 300,000 Indian immigrants live in legal limbo. They should be allowed to flex their entrepreneurial muscle without fear of being deported.

And that’s just India. There are millions of talented individuals from Asia, Europe, and elsewhere who could do wonders for America’s ailing economy, if the law would let them. A co-winner of this year’s chemistry Nobel, Ei-ichi Negishi, is an immigrant from Japan. How many like him want to come here, but can’t?

This year’s physics Nobel laureates, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novosolev, emigrated from Russia to the UK. What if they had come to the U.S. instead?

Most immigrants to the United States have lower skills than a potential Nobel Prize winner. But policy makers cannot look into the future and figure out who will win a Nobel Prize and who will be average. Immigration restrictions make it less likely for Americans to win that prize. Immigrants are less likely to find a country where they could intellectually flourish. That is the world’s loss.

The number of Nobel-caliber intellects who have lost their opportunity to do research in this country is unknown. What is known is that the U.S. government has kept out millions of the most inventive, brilliant, and entrepreneurial people in the world for no good reason.

Source: The American Spectator

 


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