Every year the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival honors filmmakers through the Nestor Almendros Prize, named for a director and friend of the HRW organization. This year Katarina Rejger and Eric van den Broek, two Dutch filmmakers, won the $5,000 prize for their collection of six “Video letters,” (June 19-23) taped exchanges between friends who had been separated during the Bosnian war in the early 1990s.

One video letter, “Mujesira & Jovisa” contained an appeal by a Muslim woman named Mujesira, who addresses a man she thinks might have information about where the bones of her children, killed in 1993, are buried (she last saw her 15-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son on a bridge in the Croatian town of Jezernice). When he sees the video, the man, named Savic Nikola, realizes that he has never met Mujesira.

Throughout the course of the half-hour letter, Ms. Rejger and Mr. van den Broek travel to the Serbian town of Drinsko and its outskirts, looking for war-ravaged citizens who might know where Mujesira’s children’s bones are buried. Mujesira repeatedly journeys to the Jezernice bridge, rummaging in vain through the grass for any sign of human remains. The segment, filmed simply with conversation and devoid of cinematic bells and whistles, is a moving tribute to the survivors of the war.

Not all the movies concern war-related issues – many focus on young people facing tremendous but natural burdens in their everyday lives. “Living Rights” (June 18 & 20) produced by Foundation Dovana Films, showcases three teens from Asia, Africa, and Europe who struggle to conform to the limitations of their environment.

“Yoshi” looks at Yoshinori Takeuchi, a 16-year-old with Aspergers Syndrome, a disability related to autism. As he addresses the camera underneath a desk lamp, he explains the bullying he faces from “normal” kids on his street, and describes his desires to leave his “special” school.

“Toti,” a 14-year-old Maasai native from Kenya, looks to reconnect with her family after three years, when she ran away from a potential forced marriage and genital circumcision. Finally, “Lena” showcases a 12-year-old Belarussian girl who must decide whether to stay with a foster mother near the Chernobyl nuclear site, or travel to an adoptive family in Italy who would be able to care for Lena’s developing brain tumor.

Over the course of 13 days, the festival will showcase 26 films from the U.S. and 19 other countries. The cinematic ground covered ranges from Lubbock, Texas, where a 15-year-old girl decides, in “The Education of Shelby Knox” (June 14, 17 & 19), that her high school’s policy of teaching abstinence isn’t the best way of approaching teen sex, to Medellin, Colombia, where young guerilla warriors patrol the dust-covered roads.

“La Sierra” (June 16, 18 & 20) a film by Scott Dalton and Margarita Martinez profiles two teens and one 22-year-old involved in a neighborhood civil war in Medellin. Edison, 22, is the leader of the Bloque Metro paramilitary group; in between fighting other guerillas in neighboring towns, he must care for his six young children, all of whom have different mothers. Cielo, 17, travels every week to the local jail to visit her boyfriend, Carlos, another Bloque Metro member. Jesus, 19, realizes that his life has spiraled out of control as a Bloque Metro fighter, even as he feeds his addictions to cocaine and marijuana. Their stories, like so many in the festival, are stories of survival.

Until June 23 (Lincoln Center, 212-875-5600).