Screening & Panel · Never Whistle Alone · Berlin Premiere

Outdoor at ACUD MACHT NEU, Veteranenstr 21, 10119 Berlin (U8 Rosenthaler Platz)

Free tickets here - limited seats

A film directed by Marco Ferrari, IT, 2019 (Italian with English subtitles)

PROGRAMME

In partnership with The Good Lobby
In cooperation with the Human Rights Film Festival Berlin

SCREENING: Never Whistle Alone

Never Whistle Alone (IT, 2019, 75m, directed by Marco Ferrari) is a collective story told by seven Italian whistleblowers. The film is not a reportage on their cases. It wants instead to reveal a discriminatory practice that is rooted into our working culture: the people who report white-collar crimes, instead of being appreciated, are treated like traitors and, ultimately, they become victims of their own organizations. (Marco Ferrari, Film Director).

Employees from diverse business fields tell us about the illegal activities they have discovered inside their company. They lead us into the rooms where illicit agreements are signed, and show us what they saw. Each of them tells a different case, but all stories have the same plot: regular corruption, attempts to involve others, intimidations for those who don’t play the game, mobbing, isolation. Interview after interview, the protagonists tell us the story of a normal employee who discovers the bosses‘ illegal activities and has to decide what to do. His life and his future are at stake. On the other side of the table, there is a criminal system that runs 100 billions euro a year.

PANEL

The film screening is followed by a panel discussion with:

The panel focuses on the impact of whistleblowing in politics, films and culture and discusses the measures of whistleblowing protection adopted in Italy at a European level.

With the introduction of the EU Whistleblowing Directive last year, the EU has made an important step towards protecting whistleblowers. But as a result of institutional shortcomings, and despite the best efforts by many of the actors involved in the process, the regulations won't match up to international standards. It is now upon Member States to iron out these shortcomings when transposing the EU Directive, a process which so far doesn't really look encouraging: In Spain, Congress recently debated a bill that wouldn't meet half of the Directive's requirements. In Germany, several ministries openly rejected a horizontal approach, which would in practise mean that whistleblowers will not have gained much in terms of legal certainty. After two years and a half in force, Italian whistleblowing legislation has shown all its limits and needs to be reformed. What are the main room for improvements? What are the cultural and societal barriers preventing whistleblowing practices to take off in Italy and at a European level? The global COVID-19 pandemic has underlined the importance of whistleblowers and transparency structures in effectively tackling societal challenges. But a lot has still to be done to protect whistleblowers at a legal level as well as to promote the positive aspects of their role in society. As the film Never Whistle Alone demonstrates, it requires a collective effort to increase the legitimacy of whistleblowing and to contribute in creating an unbiased narrative around this act, focusing on its long-term positive impact.


SPEAKERS

Priscilla Robledo was formerly an intellectual property lawyer representing corporate clients, moved to the nonprofit sector in 2015. She works as a campaigner for civil rights causes. She advocates for whistleblowing protection in Italy and Europe since 2016, and has worked on the campaigns for national and European WB legislations. She focuses also on transparency, business and human rights, lgbtqia+ rights, and women rights. She has been involved in videomaking and impact documentary since 2016. Never Whistle Alone (2019) is her first film. She is currently co-producing the documentary Chic & Fabulous (Italy, wip 2020) and developing a film on fast fashion and global supply chains. 

Veronika Nad works as a free speech activist and is the Head of the German Whistleblower Project at Blueprint for Free Speech e.V. In this position, she coordinated the organization’s efforts in advocating for the introduction of an EU Directive on the protection of whistleblowers. As a trained anthropologist, she is particularly interested in questions regarding the adoption and implications of whistleblowing schemes in different socio-cultural contexts and has done extensive research on the state of whistleblower protection in Europe. Veronika lives in Berlin.

Anna Ramskogler-Witt is convinced that documentaries can be a very powerful vehicle to raise awareness and inspire people to act. After studying art history, she started her professional career at the Austrian-based film distribution POOOL. After seeing the impact of her first film release “Winds of Sand - Women of Rock,” she was hooked. After stops at the Viennese Human rights film festival “This Human World” and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights she became director of the Human Rights Film Festival Berlin.

Tatiana Bazzichelli is founder and artistic director of the Disruption Network Lab, an organisation in Berlin working on information technology, network culture, hacktivism and whistleblowing. In 2011-2014 she was programme curator at transmediale festival, where she developed the year-round initiative reSource transmedial culture berlin and curated several conference events, workshops and installations. She has been appointed jury member for the Hauptstadtkulturfonds (Capital Cultural Fund) by the German Federal Government and Berlin for the funding years 2019-2020).

Screening in partnership with The Good Lobby
In cooperation with Human Rights Film Festival Berlin