Currently in its second week, the Human Rights Watch Film Festival proves once again that the documentary format is one of the most important institutions in our contemporary reality, and that this important window to reality helps to shed light on human rights abuses that exist everywhere.

As Helga Stephenson, former Toronto International Film Festival honcho and current director of the Human Rights festival, says, “These things like to thrive in secrecy and darkness-all abuse does.”

Following a successful inaugural session, this year’s edition of the festival offers portraits from as far away as Korea and the Philippines to illuminate the dire circumstances under which people all over the globe live, and also offers up images from as close as the United States, where topics such as the treatment of Arabs in post-9/11 America and the morality and legality of the death penalty are examined.

The festival also hopes to raise awareness about the Human Rights Watch organization, one that Stephenson describes as “sophisticated,” “magnificent,” and “fabulous” for the work that it does. The group’s purpose is not only to document worldwide violations, but also to raise awareness, and can be credited with being the first group to recognize the atrocities in Darfur, bringing the crisis to the world’s attention.

This process is very rigorous, and Stephenson elaborates that “they’re very sophisticated in terms of getting media attention, and are very rigorous in how they collect information. Because they believe in the international court, ultimately you have to present your information and documentation in such a way that it can hold up there.”

Additionally, Human Rights Watch collects information about a purported crisis area and must adhere to certain standards in order to be effective.

“In other words,” Stephenson explains, “you can’t come out of the desert screaming genocide. You have to come out with reports, documentation, you have to come out with three witnesses, names, dates, etc. They’re very meticulous about this, but then once they’ve got it, they go very public with it and they open up public support and they lobby governments to do something about it. But they have to be unassailable in their material. It takes time.”

The festival and its co-founder hope to raise both awareness and money for the organization, and Stephenson points out that it is surprising how little it takes to make a difference.

“It would be nice to get a donation, because for the kind of work we do, even very little does a lot in terms of the kind of research we do in areas like Darfur.”

Beyond that, Stephenson encourages people to get involved-if not with her organization, then with something else.

“I don’t think it matters where you do something, but I think it’s important that you do something, somewhere.”

The festival enters its second week with the Academy Award-nominated documentary Born Into Brothels (Feb. 8), Life on the Tracks (Feb. 9), which Stephenson describes as taking place in “a no-man’s land of a slum in Manila where the train roars through every half hour.” The festival winds up with Deadline (Feb. 10), a documentary that hits close to home, where “a journalism class took on some cases on Death Row in Illinois and within a matter of months overturned about four of them,” says Stephenson. The film shows this unfolding story and its end result, where the governor of the state commuted all the inmates’ sentences based on the students’ work.

While it’s easy to get cynical when facing the world and all its problems, venues such as the Human Rights Watch Festival can be an excellent entry point into getting involved and becoming aware of what the world looks like for others by simply showing us how they live, and in the process, the humanity which bridges the distance between us.

Tickets for the Human Rights Film Festival are available at the Cinematheque box office (Jackman Hall, 89 McCaul St.). Tickets for remaining screenings are going fast, so move quickly.