Film producer Ewa Ewart receives award from human rights ombudsman

On Tuesday, the Human Rights Commissioner Adam Bodnar awarded Ewa Ewart - Polish journalist, director and producer of documentaries, which had exposed numerous counts of human rights violation across the world - with the Honorary Medal "For Merit To Human Rights Protection".

The laureate said in the acceptance speech that she struggled with doubts regarding the purpose of her work many times across her whole career. "I've been asked this question by complete strangers: 'Is it worth taking risk? Is it worth putting yourself in dangerous situations?'" - Ewart said.

"I asked myself too, but paradoxically not in dangerous situations when I had to stand face to face with higher risk. I asked myself this question mostly after exposing another human rights violation in another movie, which had failed my hopes for it to change things. That was the case with my film about North Korea ("Access to Evil"), which had exposed cases of genocide, carried out by the government against the citizens. Lack of reaction by those who could have reacted made me feel for the first time I had enough. I really wanted to quit my work, because I thought to myself that I couldn't change the world, and I really had such dreams in me. God, how naive were those dreams!" - she said.

Soon later, however, Ewa Ewart was making the movie "Children of Beslan". She recalls that it was then when she "sat down and had a serious conversation" with herself. "This film turned down to be the most important for me, for which I paid a price in the form of emotions, but which also made me never to question the purpose of my work again. I thought to myself that if couldn't save the world, maybe I should tone down a notch, quit having expectations and simply do my thing" - said Ewa Ewart.

Ombudsman Adam Bodnar said that the award was meant to mark the outstanding and out of the ordinary work of Ewa Ewart. "This work can be evaluated from the strictly journalist point of view, in order to see the highest standard of reliability and objectivity," he said. "However, it can also be seen from another angle, showing the scope in which this work affects our understanding of human rights and influences the social perception of certain topics. Thanks to you we have a chance to understand the world and become sensitive to the need for respecting of human rights, not only in Poland, but across the world too. This is a very unique approach, which resulted from your experience and from your closeness to the world and people," Human Rights Commissioner Adam Bodnar added.