For a ninth year, students at the Centre for Development and Emergency Practice at Oxford Brookes University have curated a Human Rights Film Festival to explore a range of pressing issues of global concern.

Screenings till March 11 are free and several are followed by panel discussions with academics and activists.

Two titles focus on conditions inside Iran. Adapted from her own graphic novels, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2008) chronicles a young girl’s political maturation after she is sent to Vienna by her liberal parents to escape the consequences of the Islamic Revolution. Using clean shapes and limited colour to make the disruption of everyday life by the imposition of strict theocratic law seem all the more drastic, this is a provocative treatise on the price required for freedom.

Coming more up to date, Kurdish auteur Bahman Ghobadi exposes the perils of city life under Mahmud Ahmadinejad in No One Knows About Persian Cats (2009), which follows musicians Hamed Behdad and Ashkan Koohzad as they emerge from prison to trawl Teheran’s underground music scene in the hope of securing the papers they need to play a gig in London.

Across the Middle East, the Oscar-nominated Ajami (2009) is a time-shifting, multi-storylined slice of life that’s set in the eponymous, impoverished district of Jaffa, where Jews, Muslims and Christians rub along in an uneasy harmony. Co-directed by Israeli Scandar Copti and Palestinian Yaron Shani, this is an uncompromising urban drama that’s made all the more powerful by the naturalism of the largely non-professional cast.

The remaining three features deal with the status of women, with poverty and a broken romance prompting pregnant 17- year-old Catalina Sandino Moreno to act as a mule for a Colombian drug baron in Joshua Marston’s Maria, Full of Grace (2004). However, having been taught how to swallow pellets of cocaine, Moreno is subjected to untold dangers en route from Bogota to New York.

Moving to Africa, Senegalese auteur Ousmane Sembene denounces the barbaric practice of female circumcision in Moolaadé (2005), which employs a mixture of patriarchal satire and humanist melodrama to highlight the unequal struggle between progress and tradition as tribal wife Fatoumata Coulibaly strives to save five young girls from ‘purification’. And, finally, Anthony Fabian harks back to the bleak heyday of apartheid in Skin (2008), a biopic of Sandra Laing, in which Sophie Okonedo excels as the white girl whose life is blighted by a rare genetic irregularity that gives her skin a black pigmentation.

For full film and venue details, see www.brookes.ac.uk/go/humanrights