American INSIGHT & Free Speech Film Festival

American INSIGHT's mission is to provide insight into and promote knowledge of Free Speech, Human Rights, and the Rule of Law. With recent uprisings by protesters around the globe, the urge for freedom continues to shape our lives everyday.

Mission

American INSIGHT’s mission is to promote the history and values of Free Speech, Human Rights, and the Rule of Law, and to empower students to use their voice to discuss how these values emerge in societies around the world through the lens of independent filmmakers.

We provide the tools to help you speak out against and amend injustice through the power of film and social media. Through our live events and multimedia digital content, our goal is to provide a fresh outlook on the core values of America’s constitutional republic and legal system.

Programs and Activities

We offer a variety of in-person, hybrid, and online programs and activities. Everything we do is united by our commitment to building community support by broadening exposure to the history and future of Free Speech.

Our Free Speech Online Course, Make History Every Day, provides a roadmap to understanding your right to speak freely, to find your inner voice. It will make a difference in your life—every day! The course is a self-guided, self-reflective deep-dive through history that connects the core values of our nation to contemporary Free Speech FilmsTM and their filmmakers from around the world.

The Free Speech Film Festival highlights the prominent voices in today’s Human Rights Movement and invites filmmakers from around the world to submit films that present their unique perspectives in the fight against injustice. Our Free Speech Award recognizes one film among many submissions that best embodies the core principles of free speech and provides insight into how we as global citizens can shape the future of the Human Rights Movement.

The SPEAK EZ workshops showcase Free Speech Award-winning directors and their crews. You’ll get an intimate look at the filmmaking process, meet other students, and discuss the politics behind the creation of films that have been submitted from more than 50 countries around the world.

The Free Speech Storyline documents the evolution of Free Speech, Human Rights, and the Rule of Law. It provides an interactive and educational timeline of historically significant people and events. Our latest Free Speech Award-winning film is added to the Free Speech Storyline every year.

The Free Speech Archives preserves rare footage and multimedia materials from all our events throughout our decades of promoting Free Speech and the Spoken Word.

The Free Speech Blog gives you a deeper insight into what the pursuit of Free Speech, Human Rights, the Rule of Law looks like in our world today. The blog is populated with selected entries from students who take the Make History Every Day course.

The Free Speech Spotlight Blog features interviews with Free Speech Film Festival award-winning directors and highlights articles, announcements, and behind-the-scenes insights about the festival. This blog is also populated with selected entries from students who take the Make History Every Day course.

Our Story

American INSIGHT was founded in 1983 as the American Poetry Center and promoted the Spoken Word for the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts before the concept became known as National Poetry Month.

Our organization was rebranded as American INSIGHT in 2005. Based on five years of research into Violet Oakley’s murals in the Pennsylvania State Capitol Building, we developed our Free Speech Storyline and Free Speech Film Festival, and discovered the story of Benjamin Chew, Esq. Our Free Speech Archives now contain 40 years of institutional history in multimedia formats and a decade of research about Benjamin Chew.

Empower students with a charitable donation to American INSIGHT