Apart from Life

Five Sydney-based youngsters navigate life, experience friendship, seek love, delve into their sexuality, and face the challenges of being a part of the LGBTQ+ community.

'M' is an old woman who lives adrift: a lonely shadow that crosses her own geography every day. She spends her days dreaming about her past, until one day she finds something very similar to her - an ant. M decides to share her world haunted by nostalgic memories and a dark presence, until the day a "mechanical angel" arrives to help her...

Shun and Nagisa first meet and fall in love during their first year of high school. While Shun is graduating from university, Nagisa tells him that he doesn't see a future for them. Despite Shun's strong feelings, they go their separate ways. Years later, Shun is now a store owner, living alone in a rural area. Out of the blue, Nagisa arrives with his six-year-old daughter, Sora. Spending time together, Shun realizes he still harbors feelings for Nagisa. Can Nagisa reconcile with his feelings for Shun, which have been there all along?

In a city overflowing with buildings and slums, Smita must find herself a house to rent. She is hard-working, honest and respectful - the ideal tenant - except for one glaring flaw. She is a middle-class Indian woman without a husband. An intimate perspective on the identity of the 'Ideal Indian Female' in urban India of today.

Eager to find a better life abroad, a Senegalese woman becomes a mere governess to a family in southern France, suffering from discrimination and marginalization.

Akiko returns to her home village in Japan after seven years in South America, where she contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion. The town, thick with paranoia, is quick to ostracize the ailing Akiko. With only her best friend and her mom in her corner, Akiko suffers awful discrimination at school and at home.

Men and women caught up in a downward spiral of corruption, discrimination, poverty and death are the focus of this detective-thriller/social-drama inspired by the unsolved 1984 kidnapping of a Japanese candy company president.

In an invisible territory at the margins of society, at the border between anarchy and illegality, lives a wounded community that is trying to respond to a threat: of being forgotten by political institutions and having their rights as citizens trampled. Disarmed veterans, taciturn adolescents, drug addicts trying to escape addiction through love, ex-special forces soldiers still at war with the world, floundering young women and future mothers, and old people who have not lost their desire to live. Through this hidden pocket of humanity, the door opens to the abyss of today's America.

At the strong insistence of his father, Ushimatsu Segawa conceals his origins from a “buraku” area of low-class “untouchables,” leaving his hometown to serve as an elementary school teacher where he excels and is loved by his students. But he constantly struggles with the secret of his low-birth status and is disturbed by all of the discrimination levelled upon his class. It prevents him from pursuing a romance with Shiho, whom he meets at the temple where he resides, but who descends from a samurai family.

In Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, Walter Süskind is a member of the Dutch Jewish Council who rescues hundreds of children from the concentration camps.

After the closure of US Japanese Internment Camps at the end of World War II, a Japanese American family returns home and must find the strength to rebuild both their house and family amidst the emotional and physical destruction.

A proud black man and his school-teacher wife face discriminatory challenges in 1960s America.

After their daughter is discriminated in her school, Victoria and Rosana's relationship falls into a crisis due to their different opinions on the matter. Victoria will have to face the fear of assuming her homosexuality and the possible dissolution of her family.

After a disastrous event on his construction site, Armando acts quickly to save his crew, but instead stumbles upon an unspeakable truth.

A young African boy with a haunting back story starts school in Ireland, and finds out quickly exactly what it means to be the new kid. Winner of Best Narrative Short at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival and nominated for an Oscar.

A converted Muslim woman narrates her ordeal of how she once wanted to become a nurse but was abducted from her home and manipulated by religious vanguards and turned into an ISIS terrorist and landed in Afghanistan jail.

The true story of parents who discover that their two young daughters have a genetic disease that makes it fatal for them to be exposed to ordinary light.

A sheep farmer whose remote and quiet life is disturbed by the arrival of both his lover and his twin sister.

Two teenagers, an orphan hen who loves reggaeton music and the son of a champion fighting-cock, will live an adventure in which they will learn to accept themselves, alongside a great lesson in tolerance and nonviolence.

An Indian arouses envy for his expertise in hunting animals without ruining their skins, for his wisdom and his kindness.