Via Dolorosa

More than 65 million people around the world have been forced from their homes to escape famine, climate change and war, the greatest displacement since World War II. Filmmaker Ai Weiwei examines the staggering scale of the refugee crisis and its profoundly personal human impact. Over the course of one year in 23 countries, Weiwei follows a chain of urgent human stories that stretch across the globe, including Afghanistan, France, Greece, Germany and Iraq.

An absurd game of “finding happiness” is being played by local Latvian coyotes* and illegal immigrants on the Russian and the European Union border. It is a game with no winner – all participants are driven to play by the sense of despair. While one side leaves home and undertakes a perilous journey to the other side of the globe, hoping to spend the rest of their lives in a free country, the other side risks their freedom to earn a chance to stay right where they are, in their homeland. *coyote – someone who smuggles illegal immigrants

A homeless musician finds meaning in his life when he starts a friendship with dozens of parrots.

Rotem Genossar, a teacher at the Bialik-Rogozin campus in south Tel Aviv, founds a running group for his students, young African refugees whose families fled their homeland and now live in Israel without any legal status. At first running is just a social activity for the students, but it quickly becomes a means to fight for their civil rights, part of a struggle to secure them a place of their own, out of the margins of Israeli society.

Draussen bleiben

A courageous pastor uses his underground network to rescue and aid North Korean families as they risk their lives to embrace freedom.

Australian filmmaker Sophia Turkiewicz investigates why her Polish mother abandoned her and uncovers the truth behind her mother's wartime escape from a Siberian gulag, leaving Sophia to confront her own capacity for forgiveness.

Poignant stories of homelessness on the West Coast of the US frame this cinematic portrait of a surging humanitarian crisis.

In 1994, the Zapatista National Liberation Army, made up of impoverished Mayan Indians from the state of Chiapas, took over five towns and 500 ranches in southern Mexico. The government deployed its troops and at least 145 people died in the ensuing battle. Filmmaker Nettie Wild travelled to the country's jungle canyons to film the elusive and fragile life of this uprising.

Escaping a refugee life from war-torn Syria sparks hope for a family looking to adapt to an American life.

Part road-movie and part intimate portrait of lives in transit, IT WILL BE CHAOS unfolds between Italy and the Balkan corridor, intercutting two unforgettable refugees stories of human strength and resilience.

This feature documentary follows three newly arrived people in Canada and their experiences with the Canadian Refugee process. As claims are assessed and paperwork is double checked, we begin to examine exactly who can be considered a refugee.

The four Afghan refugees who have applied for asylum in Austria strike up the song, “The caravan moves on” again and again. Encouraged by the journalist Lucy Ashton to record their lives on their smartphone cameras as a video diary, the friends film their precarious daily routine between visits to authorities, small jobs, and changing accommodations. Yet even when hope is lost, one certainty remains: the power of friendship.

Cambodian refugee Ted Ngoy builds a multi-million dollar empire by baking America's favourite pastry: the doughnut.

Recounted mostly through animation to protect his identity, Amin looks back over his past as a child refugee from Afghanistan as he grapples with a secret he’s kept hidden for 20 years.

Valery Liashkevich is a homeless artist who lives at a railway station and for over twenty years has painted pictures in the streets of the town of Gomel in Belarus. For the natives he is no more than a local attraction. For art critics he is a phenomenon worth close attention.

Route 4

Refuge(e) traces the incredible journey of two refugees, Alpha and Zeferino. Each fled violent threats to their lives in their home countries and presented themselves at the US border asking for political asylum, only to be incarcerated in a for-profit prison for months on end without having committed any crime. Thousands more like them can't tell their stories.

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.

This documentary about teenagers living on the streets in Seattle began as a magazine article. The film follows nine teenagers who discuss how they live by panhandling, prostitution, and petty theft.