Films are a powerful way to raise awareness, improve understanding and encourage positive behaviour changes, that’s why the Health for All Film Festival (HAFF) recruits year after year a new generation of film and video innovators to champion and promote health issues.

The HAFF website includes examples of films created to improve the health status of people globally, and tips for encouraging an educative usage of our selection of short films gathered since the first HAFF edition in 2020.

The Health for All Film Festival (HAFF) is based on the shared assumption that audio-visual language is one of the key elements of WHO’s “Communicating for health impact” approach. Well produced and well targeted short films can even sometimes directly improve the health status of some groups of persons, by encouraging behaviour change or providing knowledge, motivation or skills needed for people to take action.

HAFF encourages health experts to comment our catalogue of films in order to highlight how those stories could be used to obtain change. This is developed in synergy with the WHO Academy or the WHO’s Behavioural Insights unit among other WHO’s technical departments. Visit our page Films for health impact to learn more. 

Our HAFF is also a way to gather stories about various actions for health around the world which illustrate WHO’s global health goals set out in its Thirteenth General Programme of Work (GPW13). This is an encouragement for more films to be efficiently made and used as a contribution to these public health goals. Our festival amplifies the voices and stories of those implementing WHO’s scientific guidelines and recommendations, for a better understanding of their concerns.