HUMANISM BY OTHER MEANS: EXPERIMENTAL DOCUMENTARY, HUMAN RIGHTS CULTURES AND POSTHUMANISM

Human rights activists often assume that humanitarian documentaries are more accessible and relatable than lengthy reports, making these films central for public education about global human rights violations. Nonetheless, such documentaries have faced criticism for rehashing problematic narratives and aesthetic conventions, such as that of “the hero’s journey”—a paradigm that, as several scholars argue, simplifies or de-historicizes complex geopolitical realities to create relatable emotional experiences for the viewer, evoking empathy with a human subject as an assumed solution to structural inequalities. This tension between the individual and the structural catalyzes my project, which focuses on contemporary documentaries that deliberately refuse common sentimental tropes by depicting human rights violations in the absence of a human figure. My engagement with films such as Kumjana Novakova’s "Silence of Reason" (2023), Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed’s "Purple Sea" (2020), Ognjen Glavonić’s "Depth Two" (2016) and Philip Scheffner’s "Havarie" (2016) demonstrates how deploying formal abstraction techniques—such as environmental imagery, impersonal presentation of evidence, an emphasis on mediation and materiality, and slow aesthetics—challenges humanitarian representations rooted in Enlightenment-based humanism. These films, I argue, effectively redirects attention from an individualistic view, in which recognition is predicated on and reinforces the liberal ethical Subject, towards a non-anthropocentric ethics of interdependence and relationality. The analysis of the films is situated within the material conditions of their production and reception. I consider the international film festival circuit to be a crucial site where aestheticopolitical patterns of filmmaking are defined and reflected through curation, categorization, and award ceremonies. I introduce the term “posthuman rights documentaries” to bridge the films’ posthuman aesthetic sensibilities and their institutional function as “human rights documentaries.” Rather than indicating a moment of supersession, the prefix post- signals these films’ oscillation between radical aesthetics that undermine the centrality of the human and humanist agendas that shape the liberal, democratic understandings of harm (as violation of legal rights), accountability (as criminalizing the individual) and action (as humanitarian interventions). Thus, while posthuman rights documentaries deliberately reject the humanitarian visual regime, they nevertheless complement the liberal humanism of Euro-American film festivals.