Guest Speakers

JUDY JACKSON

Panelist
Filmmaker ~ Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, Canada
www.judyfilms.com

Judy Jackson is a veteran independent filmmaker whose previous documentaries include Baby Business, The Toughest Job In The World: Louise Arbour And The War Crimes Tribunal, A Moment In Time; The United Colours Of Bronstein, It Takes A Child: Craig Kielburger’s Story – A Journey Into Child Labour, and Talk Mogadishu.  Her latest film is Never Again, the story of the search for international justice.
 
“Throughout my years as a documentary filmmaker, I have often focused my camera on corners of the world where citizens live in daily dread of tyrants. Consequently, I have been witness to many crazy worlds - where people are dropped from helicopters (Argentina: the Dirty War); where breasts and testicles are cut off, and unborn babies hacked from their mothers' bellies (Guatemala); and where new forms of atrocity are invented ('The Disappeared': Chile and ethnic cleansing in Rwanda and Kosovo).

“During those years the idea of international justice seemed just a dream. Dictators were not held accountable for their crimes. Impunity was the order of the day. The concept of international justice died after Nuremberg. For the next 50 years Cold War politics would stymie all efforts to resurrect it. Powerful nations were unwilling to yield their sovereign rights.

“It was dangerous work, and I too, learnt how if feels to live in fear - to have a gun at your head, to receive death threats, to be tailed and to be arrested. I took risks because I thought it was important to bring back the voices of the voiceless - to tell the stories of the repressed, the tortured and the dead. It was not much, but it was all that could be done in those years.

Little did I know how resilient and ceaseless these voices would be.”