24th WATCH DOCS Human Rights in International Film Festival

WATCH DOCS is one of the largest human rights film festivals in the world presenting documentaries in which commitment to social issues and individual rights is combined with film art.

The 24th WATCH DOCS IFF will include a documentary film competition with international jury, permanent repertoire sections, tributes and retrospectives, panel debates, masterclasses, and many other events. Besides the international festival held in Warsaw, they also organize the Traveling WATCH DOCS Festival, which visits over 30 Polish localities throughout a year, as well as WATCH DOCS online. Altogether, WATCH DOCS attracts over 80.000 viewers annually.

WATCH DOCS is the oldest documentary film festival in Warsaw, Poland – the first edition of the festival took place in 2001.

Each year the festival shows over fifty world-class documentary films. At the international festival in Warsaw, travelling festival organized in more than thirty Polish localities and at the online festival, the total of over eighty thousand viewers take part in screenings each year.

Awards & Prizes

• WATCH DOCS Award – awarded to the best feature-length documentary in the Main Competition
• Marek Nowicki Prize – since 2003, awarded by the Board of the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights for excellent lifetime achievements in showing human rights in film.
• Audience Award – awarded by viewers to the best feature-length documentary of the festival.
• Green Dog Award – awarded by the youth jury to the best film in the Green Competition for documentaries on environment and human rights.

Eligibility Criteria

• Only documentary films and films from the fringes of this genre may be submitted to the festival.
• Only films pertaining to broadly-perceived human rights and social issues may be submitted to the festival.
• There are no run time limitations as for submitted films, however, only films with run times of 50 minutes and longer will be taken into consideration for the main competition for the WATCH DOCS Award.
• The festival will only accept submissions of films produced after January 1, 2023.
• The screener must contain English subtitles if the original language is other than English or Polish.

For more information, visit Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights.