The matchmaking workshop Civil Society Pitch returns to One World Romania 10. The event is a pitching forum for human rights issues to be converted into documentary films. It is an innovative initiative that seeks to create mixed teams of documentary filmmakers and human rights activists from Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary.
Between March 18th and 19th, human rights activists will have a chance to present to local and foreign documentary film experts, ideas that can be transformed into documentary films from their field of work. The pitches will be based on familiar topics to which civil society members have direct access and which they have documented over time. In the second part of the workshop, the presentations will be followed by discussions between participants, in the form of speed dating sessions and, at the end, the filmmakers themselves will have the opportunity to present their artistic perspective of the documentary ideas proposed by the activists.
Throughout the workshop there will also be special sessions held by the tutors, as well as a case study of the film “The Invisibles” with the winning team of Civil Society Pitch 2016 pilot edition.
The workshop tutors are European experts from Balkan Documentary Center, European Documentary Network and HBO Europe. The event will be held in English.
Workshop participants were preselected between February 7th and 24th following a public CALL for applications.
Civil Society Pitch is organized in partnership with Balkan Documentary Center, VERZIO International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival in Budapest, EDN- European Documentary Network and with the support of HBO Romania and the Royal Danish Embassy in Romania.
The support offered by the Royal Danish Embassy reinforces the country’s candidature for a seat at the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2019 - 2021 and promotes the priorities set by the candidature: dignity, dialogue and development in the fight for human rights.

IT COULD BE YOU
Photo exhibition by Laurențiu Garofeanu

The photography exhibition It Could Be You is part of a larger project, Homeless People, Stories of Bucharest, which aims at a journalistic and humanitarian immersion into the homeless people’s lives in Romania’s capital.
One of the exhibition’s objectives is to reveal the faces of these unknown people, who live outside of normality and, at the same time, to open up a dialogue meant to help the larger audiences understand the situations they are confronted with.
The project Homeless People, Stories of Bucharest began in 2016 after the workshop Civil Society Pitch powered by One World Romania and is developed in collaboration with Samusocial Romania.
At a first stage, the team conducted a series of photo shootings and interviews with different homeless people whom they took out of the anonymity of their daily environment and to whom they offered the opportunity to tell their stories.