Rebecca Sommer is a New-York-based and German-born human rights advocate, journalist, artist and filmmaker, founder of Earth Peoples (www.earthpeoples.org) and the representative for the Society for Threatened Peoples International, a human rights NGO in consultative status to the United Nations. (www.gfbv.de).
Rebecca Sommer has earned a reputation as an outstanding personality in many fields. She was editor at large for Madison magazine (NYC), Spirit and Scene magazine (London), photographer, set designer, SFX artist and art director. While she earns her living as an artist, she devotes most of her time to the support of indigenous peoples. During the May 2006 Session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (PFII) in New York, she premiered her documentary film The United Nations and Indigenous Peoples on the plight of indigenous peoples from around the world. This awareness-raising film was commissioned by the United Nations PFII secretariat, and received the New York Festivals International Film & Video Award, International Affairs, 2007.
Rebecca Sommer grew up in the Harz forest of Germany, and on the North Sea island of Langeoog. She later lived and worked in India, South Africa, Peru, Brazil, England and the United States. Focused on environmental and human rights issues, Rebecca visits remote places and indigenous communities from around the world, often under very harsh conditions.
Rebecca Sommer?s independent “no-budget” documentaries are simple, straightforward and unadorned. Created specifically to raise awareness on pressing issues faced by indigenous peoples around the world, they are used by human rights advocates, non-governmental organizations and the affected peoples themselves to lobby those who could help them, the UN system, journalists, diplomats, and politicians.
Since October 2005, Rebecca Sommer has been particularly engaged with the plight of the indigenous peoples in Southeast Asia. While continuing her ongoing work “UNtruth,” educational documentary series on the indigenous peoples struggling for their rights at the UN, OAS, and in their homeland, she finalized in 2007 two documentaries on human rights violations committed against indigenous peoples in Vietnam, Laos and Thailand, a news reel on the Adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and one short dance-art film, Redwood Forest. Rebecca is currently finalizing several work-in-progress shorts and documentary films: a 5-minute series on indigenous children in Southeast Asia, one documentary on the impact of tourism on Mien women in Vietnam, one feature film on the life of a 12-year-old Black Hmong girl from northern Vietnam, and the feature documentary on the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
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