Hospitality

This documentary follows various migratory bird species on their long journeys from their summer homes to the equator and back, covering thousands of miles and navigating by the stars. These arduous treks are crucial for survival, seeking hospitable climates and food sources. Birds face numerous challenges, including crossing oceans and evading predators, illness, and injury. Although migrations are undertaken as a community, birds disperse into family units once they reach their destinations, and every continent is affected by these migrations, hosting migratory bird species at least part of the year.

A meeting between two strangers sparks the desire to understand each other through the medium of cinema. They both simultaneously start recording their surroundings on camera and crafting the resulting footage. They, Elettra from Italy and Hazem from Gaza, become the subjects of this film that documents their first moments together. It depicts a multi-faceted reality in which North and South confront each other in a discussion on rights and inequalities, a reality in which we witness a migration towards one another, while capturing an intimate way of making a film together.

A migrant boat has been stranded in the Mediterranean Sea for 30 hours. As authorities ignore calls for help, the Sea-Watch Crew, an NGO, launches an urgent search.

Dublin, June 2024: thousands of men seeking asylum in Ireland are homeless. Olivia and her group of volunteers are trying to find safe locations where the men can sleep each night, but the government is actively enforcing its new policy against homeless encampments, and the far-right are lurking.

Forastero

Director Miriam Pucitta grew up as the child of Italian migrant workers in Switzerland in the 1960s and 1970s. She herself has only fragmentary memories of this time; her mother and other relatives evade Miriam's questions. Together with her daughter Giulia, she researches her family's living conditions in Switzerland and finds a new understanding of her parents' difficult decisions.

Found footage: California in the 1950's and 60's. A young Indian couple enjoys their personal American dream come true in their home somewhere in the suburbs of San Francisco. In great detail they pose with their newly achieved wealth in front of their Super-8 camera. Just like postcards, they would send these film rolls to their joint families back in India. Around the same time, an American missionary couple visits the city of Calcutta to shoot a Christian propaganda film. The drastic reality with poverty and famine in the streets of the Indian metropolis fits perfectly into their wicked plan: To promote the faith in Jesus by showing the misery that pagan believers are doomed to suffer from.

A film about homes on both sides of an ocean.

The Mejia family emigrated from Oaxaca to Fresno, California 40 years ago. Filmmaker Trisha ZIff filmed the family in 1996, and returns now to see the changes that have settled over them, and follows the family on their return to Mexico.

Three alien women with futuristic sound headgear walk around enclosed spaces engulfed in sand. They are connected by their common ability to listen to the stories of migrant Venezuelan women abandoned objects carry.

La belle histoire de Noël

Pasos ciegos

Brair Kani explores an ancestral house located in Srinagar, Kashmir. Using the attic as a site of reflection, the film navigates the relationship between space, belonging and personal history. Inhabiting the confines of the attic, the house spirits exist simultaneously as carriers of collective memory and as manifestations of the emotional landscape.

Switzerland still carries out special flights, where passengers, dressed in diapers and helmets, are chained to their seats for 40 hours at worst. They are accompanied by police officers and immigration officials. The passengers are flown to their native countries, where they haven't set foot in in up to twenty years, and where their lives might be in danger. Children, wives and work are left behind in Switzerland. Near Geneva, in Frambois prison, live 25 illegal immigrants waiting for deportation. They are offered an opportunity to say goodbye to their families and return to their native countries on a regular flight, escorted by plain-clothes police officers. If they refuse this offer, the special flight is arranged fast and unexpectedly. The stories behind the locked cells are truly heartbreaking.

Five women, members of the Sans Papiers, talk about the history and reasons for founding the organisation, as well as their most important demands, like getting permits of residence for refugee women so they don't depend on their husbands' status.

Viramundo shows the saga of the northeastern migrants that arrive in São Paulo, beginning with a train arriving and ending with a train leaving São Paulo in a cycle repeated every day. Viramundo's aim was to question why the military coup d'état in Brazil happened without any popular resistance or revolution or reaction of the society.

Liubov, a Russian lady who lives in Mexico City. During the routine of her day, Liubov will recall the experiences she had with death, from childhood to adulthood.

One Voice: Searching for Michael Spears

Documentary about a "transportation commando" in Germany with the goal to deport 200 people to Albania...

A humorous observation in Barcelona’s immigrant neighbourhood El Raval. Four barber shops, four places of remembrance, strange time and space capsules inhabited by people who left their home to find a better one, while the Spaniards are about to leave their own country themselves.