We are actively preparing for the start of the festival on 6–13 June and are happy to announce the first news! Meet the jury members in the RIGHTS NOW! special nomination, an award for documentary films that explore and analyse the modern world and make a significant contribution to the discussion on human dignity, freedom, and equality. Up to ten films from all Docudays UA film programmes will be nominated for the human rights competition.
“Every year, the team of NGO Docudays tries to include in the jury of the human rights category the people who would highlight as much as possible the human rights issues and challenges faced by Ukraine and the world,” says Anastasiia Bahalika, Director of the Human Rights Department of NGO Docudays. “This year we consider it necessary to once again focus on the issue of the rights of people detained by russia — both prisoners of war and civilians. As well as to demonstrate our solidarity with the people of Georgia and the challenges faced by the Georgian civil society, which is friendly to Ukraine.”
Giorgi Mrevlishvili is a Georgian documentary filmmaker. In 2010, Giorgi’s project Reflection was a finalist for the Berlin Today Award at the Berlinale Film Festival. The film was also selected for Vision Du Reel’s Focus: Georgia programme in 2015 and presented at the festival dedicated to Georgian cinema in Tokyo’s Iwanami Hall in 2018. His film Zurabi, made with the Parisian film school Ateliers Varan, won the prize for Best Georgian Documentary at the 2007 Niamori Film Festival. One of his most recent works, Twelve Lessons, received a special mention at the 2019 Tbilisi International Film Festival and the award for Best Documentary at Mediawave in 2022.
Liudmyla Huseinova is an activist and public figure from the Donetsk Region, a human rights advocate, former civilian hostage who spent over three years in enemy captivity for her pro-Ukrainian stance. On 17 October 2022, Liudmyla Huseinova was returned as part of a “women’s exchange”. Since then, she has been engaged in the issues of the release of civilian hostages who have fallen outside the scope of international humanitarian law, as well as the protection of the rights of survivors of conflict-related sexual violence. She worked as the Director of Communications of the specialised NGO SEMA Ukraine, is a member of it, and in December 2024 she initiated and headed the NGO Come On, Sisters!, aimed at uniting and supporting women who have suffered during the war.
Maksym Butkevych is a human rights advocate, journalist, public figure, former military serviceman, and former prisoner of war. He is a co-founder of Hromadske Radio and the ZMINA Human Rights Centre, was a board member of the Ukrainian branch of Amnesty International, co-founder and co-coordinator of the organisation No Borders Project, worked on the protection of refugees and displaced persons, fought against discrimination, actively advocated for the release of Ukrainian political prisoners of the kremlin, including Oleh Sentsov and Oleksandr Kolchenko, moderated screenings and events of the Docudays UA festival. He has dedicated over 15 years of his life to human rights work.
From the first days of the full-scale Russian invasion, Maksym joined the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, took part in the liberation of the Kyiv Region, fought in the East, and in June 2022 was taken prisoner. In occupied Luhansk, the so-called “LPR” court sentenced Butkevych to 13 years in a high-security penal colony as a “war criminal” in a fabricated case. After two years and 4 months of imprisonment, he was released from captivity and returned to Ukraine as part of an exchange on 18 October 2024.
