The film Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World by the Dutch director Hans Pool opened the Docudays UA Travelling Human Rights Documentary Film Festival in Ternopil Region on 22 October. The screening was held in the library of Husiatyn College, a branch of the Ternopil National Technical University. The film was seen by students, teachers, library workers and other residents of the town.

On the same day, the audience also had a chance to watch the film Death By Design by the American filmmaker Sue Williams. The central topic of this year’s Docudays UA is the world of information technology: the world of enormous possibilities and equally enormous risks they pose to people. From children’s unhealthy addiction to video games to the capacity of political dictators to launch information wars and destabilize whole continents. Both films that were screened and discussed in Husiatyn touched on this relevant topic.

Choosing the Husiatyn College was not an accident: many of its students study computer engineering, programming and information business, and have significant skills and knowledge in the sphere of IT. It was also interesting to look at these problems from the perspective of human rights, freedom of information, environmental security.

Clearly, we will never give up our computers, smartphones, internet and other technological achievements; but we should remember the consequences of this dependence. The digital trail left by everyone on the internet nowadays threatens our privacy. We should teach ourselves critical thinking skills in the time when anyone can launch news into the information space: an unstoppable compulsive writer, a mentally ill person, a secret service agent of an unfriendly country. As it dives into the world wide web, humanity is losing its capacity to read books and speak proper normative language. Thanks to the internet, today we have a virtual opportunity to be anywhere at any time, but we are losing our grasp of reality in contact with one another and nature. The question is still open: How safe gadget production is for the planet and for humanity?

“We are only starting to grasp the scale of these risks. It is only starting to dawn on us that a sum of technology does not make people happy. To make the world safe and the relations between people harmonious, our great knowledge must be matched by great wisdom: How and in the name of what we should use this knowledge and these opportunities?”, emphasizes the coordinator of the Travelling Festival, Oleksandr Stepanenko. A complex discussion of these questions has started in Ternopil region.