Andy Worthington Joins Film-Makers and Authors to Judge Contest for Short Films About Torture

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Andy Worthington Joins Film-Makers and Authors to Judge Contest for Short Films About Torture

Are you a film-maker and an anti-torture activist? If so, then a video contest, for which I’m a judge, will be of interest to you. The Tackling Torture Video Contest, launched in Minneapolis on June 30 by by Tackling Torture at the Top, a committee of WAMM (Women Against Military Madness), is open to both amateur and professional filmmakers.

The deadline for entries is January 9, 2014. For full details see here — and see here for the home page.

Videos can be anything from 30 seconds to 5 minutes in duration. The contest is open to any citizen of any nation, but all videos must be in English or have full translations of all sound and text into English as part of the videos themselves.

There are four prizes in the competition: a $500 jury prize in the “serious” category; a $500 jury prize in the “humorous/satirical” category; and two $300 Audience Favorite prizes, one for “serious” and one for “humorous/satirical.”

After the deadline, 20 finalists will be announced. The selection will be made by members of Tackling Torture and the Top and WAMM. At this point the videos will be made available for audience voting, and the competition’s five judges will also view the films and make their decisions. Judging will be competed by January 30, 2014, and the winners will be announced on February 7, 2014, on the 12th anniversary of George W. Bush’s notorious memo authorizing the use of torture by declaring that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to prisoners seized in the “war on terror.”

The judges for the competition are:

Sebastian Doggart, producer of the award winning biographical documentary “American Faust: From Condi to Neo-Condi.”
Joseph Jolton, filmmaker, adjunct faculty, Media Arts, Minneapolis College of Art and Design
Professor Peter Kuznick, Professor of History at American University, co-writer with Oliver Stone of “The Untold History of the United States” documentary series for Showtime
Professor Alfred McCoy, J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror and Torture and Impunity: The US Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation .
Andy Worthington, investigative journalist and filmmaker, author of The Guantánamo Files and co-director, with Polly Nash, of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.”

This is how the organisers describe the contest:

Despite US and international law prohibiting the use of torture, the US has used torture, often euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” in its so-called “War on Terror.” Despite the law, despite documented proof that such efforts produce inadmissable evidence, false information and false confessions, and despite the blowback of such efforts, the US continues to shield the lawbreakers –both those who committed and those who authorized torture — by “looking forward, not backward,” and there is evidence that such techniques continue to be used and falsely justified.

Through TV shows like “24” and Hollywood films like the commercially successful “Zero Dark Thirty” and the new documentary “Manhunt,” the US’s use of torture is presented as viable, and even necessary to our country’s security. Unfortunately, a majority of the under-informed and misinformed public now thinks that torture is necessary and useful.

Tackling Torture at the Top, through this contest, hopes to produce entertaining and informative videos that contradict this harmful and inhumane view, educate the public, raise questions about the direction of our foreign policy and our use of the military, and by so doing, give the public the awareness and courage to rein in our country’s out of control security apparatus.

The contest managers are Tom Dickinson and Coleen Rowley (former FBI agent and whistleblower) on behalf of Tackling Torture at the Top Committee of WAMM, Minnesota, USA. For further information contact them here and also see their Facebook page.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here – or here for the US).