The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival is taking place in London 15th-25th March and brings together a collection of very interesting films this year. OneWorld.net resumes the festival here.

The full film schedule: here.

The festival includes the premiere of Killer's Paradise on the issue of violence against women in Guatemala. In particular, the film documents the story of Claudina Isabel Velasquez, a 19 year-old student, who was found dead in August 2005. Claudina's case was supported by Amnesty International as part of its campaign against violence against women.

Killer's Paradise is to be shown: Monday, 20th March at 6pm at the Ritzy.

Brixton Oval, Coldharbour Lane
Brixton, London SW2 1JG
box office: 0870 7550 062
www.picturehouses.co.uk

Tickets cost £6.75 and include the following film, "How To Plan A Revolution". You can book online here. Both films are distributed by BBC Worldwide TV.

Here's the film's synopsis on the HRW film festival website:

"In this powerful film, the award-winning team of Olenka Frenkiel and Giselle Portenier (Murder in Purdah, Israel’s Secret Weapon) document the story of the brutal killings of women in Guatemala. Since 1999, more than 2,000 women have been murdered there, with the numbers rising every year. In 2005 alone, 640 women, nearly two a day, were killed. That’s one woman in every twelve thousand murdered last year, almost ten times as many, per capita, as in Britain.

And in Guatemala, the murders are rarely investigated. Few statistics are kept, details rarely are logged, potential forensic evidence is often ignored or contaminated, so the killers invariably go free and no one, not even the country’s president, has any idea who they are or why so many women are murdered.

The answer, at least in part, is the failure of Guatemalan authorities to pursue justice for perpetrators of abuses during a civil war which killed 200,000 people. Three generations of killers have gone free; though the country is trying to show it has changed, old habits die hard.

KILLER’S PARADISE documents the story of Claudina Isabel Velasquez, a 19 year old law student murdered in summer 2005, as her family urges the authorities to investigate who killed her".