Israeli director Natalie Assouline chronicles the lives of women, mostly young mothers, in prison for involvement in failed suicide attacks/terrorists attacks in Israel. Filmed over two years, this portrait strives to unearth the motivations behind their crimes. With the women's heads and feelings firmly covered, the film reveals no answers, just the heart-breaking tension between humanity and ideology.
An Israeli film director interviews fellow veterans of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to reconstruct his own memories of his term of service in that conflict.
Though both the historical and modern-day persecution of Armenians and other Christians is relatively uncovered in the mainstream media and not on the radar of many average Americans, it is a subject that has gotten far more attention in recent years.
Short film made from photographs taken by anthropologist and photojournalist Rogério Ferrari in Palestinian territories in 2002.
14 years after his first visit, Louis Theroux meets some of the growing community of religious-nationalist Israelis who have settled in the occupied West Bank.
The interactive roadmovie follows the trail of a convicted war criminal with ties to Switzerland. On a journey through contemporary Rwanda, the viewer decides how deeply he wants to immerse himself in the story.
A shocking political exposé, and an intimate ethnographic portrait of Pacific Islanders struggling for survival, dignity, and justice after decades of top-secret human radiation experiments conducted on them by the U.S. government.
Here and Elsewhere takes its name from the contrasting footage it shows of the fedayeen and of a French family watching television at home. Originally shot by the Dziga Vertov Group as a film on Palestinian freedom fighters, Godard later reworked the material alongside Anne-Marie Miéville.
While millions of birds migrate freely in the skies above, Fadia, a Palestinian refugee stranded in Lebanon, yearns for the ancestral homeland she is denied. When a chance meeting introduces her to the director, Sarah, she challenges her to find an ancient mulberry tree that once grew next to her grandfather’s house in historic Palestine, a tree that stands witness to her family’s existence.
An Iranian filmmaker participates in a series of video calls with a young Palestinian photojournalist who describes her life confined in Gaza during the current regional conflict.
We are taken behind the scenes of a play in-the-making: The play is Samuel Beckett’s WAITING FOR GODOT—starring a group of young 48-Palestinians. One by one, we are introduced to a variety of characters: the play’s director, actors, and other ordinary people. As we delve further into each of their lives, the film reveals the startling parallels between the themes of the play and their own. Everyone is waiting for something: a permit to build a house, better work conditions, a starring role in a film. Much like Waiting for Godot, our heroes are awaiting Faraj Allah… something that may or may not come.
A look inside the work of Breaking the Silence, an organization of former IDF combat soldiers who collect and publish testimonies of soldiers who served in the occupied territories. For six months, director Silvina Landsmann, camera in hand, accompanied the staff of the organization. The many hours of footage have been refined into a film that dives into the heart of Breaking the Silence’s work: guided tours of Hebron and the surrounding area, public lectures and house meetings, internal staff meetings and media strategy. All the while the organization is forced to justify its very existence, both internally and to the broader public, and to justify its place in the political debate. The Good Soldier raises questions about Israel’s dynamic mainstream and the challenges of confronting it.
While serving with the African Union, former Marine Capt. Brian Steidle documents the brutal ethnic cleansing occuring in Darfur. Determined that the Western public should know about the atrocities he is witnessing, Steidle contacts New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof, who publishes some of Steidle's photographic evidence.
A verité legal drama about Judge Kholoud Al-Faqih, the first woman appointed to a Shari'a court in the Middle East, whose career provides rare insights into both Islamic law and gendered justice.
Rwanda, vers l'apocalypse
Linguist-philologist Mark Janse discovers speakers of the Cappadocian language – previously assumed extinct, linguists worldwide are exhilarated at the discovery, but Janse realizes the rediscovered language is doomed to die anyway.
Najwa, Nawal, and Siham, three Palestinian widows, live with their 11 children in a house on Shuhada Street in Hebron. Their house lies on the border; the façade is under Israeli occupation, the Palestinian Authority controls the back. At the entrance to the house is a military post; on the roof the Israeli army has placed a watch point over Palestinian Hebron. The three women, trapped in the middle and constantly surrounded by Israeli soldiers, carry on their difficult lives in a perverse situation: the occupation becomes a routine, the absurd becomes a given. This is the story of an occupation that extends to the staircase and the roof of the house, where it encounters poverty, loneliness, pain, but also the small joys of everyday life. This is an internal prison, the external one is the ongoing occupation.
Rama, a girl from Gaza, survived a childhood fire accident and narrates the challenges she faced afterward. Despite the hardships, she turned the accident into a miracle through her resilience, which she now uses to face the challenges of the war on Gaza and continue her path to success.
Filmed entirely with an iPhone, Teta, Opi & Me is a tribute to conformity, tolerance and courage. It is a poetic, meditative, multilingual, and feeling-driven short film, documenting the intricacies of the artist’s playful process in capturing her grandparents’ enduring romance through social, political and racial adversity. He comes from Bethlehem, Palestine and she comes from Vienna, Austria. Incorporating poetic filmic scenarios, vérité scenes, interviews, and home movies, the work is an inter-generational dialogue that explores themes of family, love, and the intermingling of cultures.
Gaza, génération génocidée