Our advocacy film has won the award for best documentary at the Kreatív Magazine’s annual webvideo contest.
Last year, HCLU’s Drugreporter launched the Room in the Eight District campaign, to call for the opening of a drug consumption room in Budapest. The campaign video has been viewed by more than 120,000 people on YouTube, and has generated heated debate in the media. Its effectiveness as a web-based advocacy tool has now been acknowledged by Kreatív Magazine, which gave us the award for the best documentary movie of the year.
The movie was filmed last year, at a time when the biggest needle and syringe program in the country was being shut down. Blue Point, the NGO operating the program in Budapest’s District 8, suffered several budget cuts and a disproportionate rent-rise from the hostile municipal council. Since 2006, the Blue Point NGO had been providing clean needles and syringes for the most marginalised injecting drug users in one of the most impoverished neighbourhoods of Budapest. Blue Point reached out to more than 3,000 clients, most of them unemployed and living in poverty. The local mayor and his team accused the program of “attracting drug users to the district”, and blamed it for the presence of drug litter on the streets. Despite the first officially registered HIV transmissions among local drug users, the NGO was forced to shut down its service by the end of the summer. (To learn more, read our detailed article!)
On June 26 2015, we expanded our campaign to an international level. Together with NGOs from Bucharest, Belgrade, Warsaw, Athens, Porto, Bratislava and Sofia, we launched the Room for Change campaign, with an interactive website and petition. Please click on the image below and visit our new site, and sign the petition for making our cities safer.
