Our Background

The Human Rights Media Trust is a non-profit organisation that formed in 2004.

2004-2014

For the first decade the objectives of the Trust were to partner and support initiatives related to human rights film and media projects. This included social impact campaigns and supporting production of human rights films and related film projects. A strong component of the work of the Trust over this period was directly related to developing and sustaining a culture of human rights in the film and television industry by giving training and employment opportunities to black youth, women and groups under-represented in film. The Trust also had an objective of developing audiences for human rights cinema. Much of this work took place via the annual Tri Continental Human Rights Film Festival, the Bi-Annual People 2 People Documentary Conference, production of television series, Alexandra My Alexandra, and in terms of Human Rights intervention work, through the initiation of Filmmakers Against Racism (FAR). The latter was in rapid response to violent xenophobic attacks that took place in 2008. The FAR films were a true collaboration between filmmakers and a range of social justice organisations wanting to make an impactful intervention to a societal crisis. The film screenings of this series provided a platform for education, planning and debate. The films made it into millions of homes via TV broadcast by the public broadcaster and continue to be used by schools and educational institutions to stimulate discussion on how do we as a society, explain and mitigate against xenophobia.

2014 – 2019

In 2014 a new decade of the Trust began, and with it a new and urgent campaign, the Marikana Support Campaign (MSC). Alongside MSC, the Trust ran a film impact campaign for the documentary, Miners Shot Down. The film and the MSC involved strong collaborative partnerships between a diverse range of organisations and individuals to call for legal justice for the murdered victims of a police shooting during a miners’ strike in 2012, and their families. The groundbreaking campaign raised awareness of enduring inequality in the extractives industries in South Africa, and critically, contributed to a significant realignment within South Africa’s socio-political landscape. The film and campaign went on to win several international awards, including the BritDoc Social Impact Award in 2015.

The work undertaken by the Trust during this period required a new focus, shifting the original objectives of supporting equality and a culture of human rights within the film industry to that of using film and creating strong partnerships to tackle social injustices in contemporary South African society. This is a post-colonial country, with deep layers of oppression inherent in the economic structures that continue to overspill into everyday life, impacting most harshly on working class black women and youth. However, it can no longer be argued that South Africa is an emerging democracy. This means the state, and the governing party that led the country into liberation, can no longer be exonerated from the unsustainable levels of inequality, poverty, gender based violence and corruption.

The Trust focused during the 2014 – 2019 period on projects that held the past and present in equal balance – effectively projects that argued that our democracy was failing to safeguard rights, and to protect the vulnerable. Instead of creating a society that was getting better, the projects the Trust supported during this era exposed that at best we were trapped in an unequal status quo, and at worst, we were moving backwards. The upward spiraling of youth unemployment, untenable gender-based violence, corruption and collapse of functioning state institutions, illustrates a society that is heading towards a crisis, rather than one that is moving towards more freedom, equality and stability.

2019 – 2024  Climate, Water & Food

During this period we pivoted towards foregrounding climate and water justice in our projects and have been producing films under the umbrella of the Hotspot Climate Film Series. We also focused on food and the Covid 19 pandemic, and coalesced with several filmmaker teams to produce a 10 short films about the negative impact of state policy on an existing South African food crisis.At the end of 2023 we released the first film in the Hotspot collection – Temperature Rising, profiling the work of African climate justice activists.

The second Hotspot film, Capturing Water, will be released at the end of 2024. The following year will see the roll-out of a dynamic social impact campaign that has been developed alongside key South African water justice activists, aimed at using the film to help fast track the coming together of local alliances and active wider coalitions that can address SDG6. 

2025 – 2026 Looking Ahead

On 1 February 2024, HRMT embarked on a new project in partnership with the Legal Resources Centre and German aid agency, Brot für die Welt. State Capture and Beyond: Entrenching Accountability and Democracy, is an EU co-funded project, aimed at supporting a culture of human rights, democracy and enhanced accountability in the public and private sector. The project will run for 30 months and is co-funded by the European Union. The overall aim of State Capture and Beyond is to amplify campaigns for improved service delivery and public accountability, build connection between interested parties in both public and private sector organisations and to build a national coalition of organisations lobbying, advocating and exposing corruption and poor service delivery at community level as well as within wider civil society.

Our Aims & Objectives

To use the craft of film making to support a culture of human rights and democracy.
To produce and support media projects with strong overarching social impact goals.
Non-fiction feature length and short version films and visual media that directly support climate crisis mitigation and adaptation themes.
To foreground the climate crisis and environmental collapse in media projects that involve other human rights issues, including gender based violence, HIV, and migrants’ rights.

Our Trustees

Rehad Desai – Chair

Anita Khanna – Executive Director

Zivia Desai Keiper – Treasurer

Michael Dixon – Lawyer

Terry Bell – Political Journalist

Dylan Valley – Filmmaker and Lecturer

Shaeera Kalla – Researcher and Activist