The Charcoal Maker

In a small and conservative Scottish village, a woman's paralytic husband convinces her to have extramarital intercourse so she can tell him about it and give him a reason for living.

This year's story follows Nicole, the granddaughter from last year's ad, who is now all grown up with a family to make Christmas traditions with. We follow her and her two adorable children, Max and Ella, as their new stepdad Mike moves into their family home. At the heart of the story is a very special storybook – a precious item belonging to Max from his birth father. The book celebrates the power of storytelling and how it can deepen family bonds; as the family are shown delighting in the magic of Disney storytelling, beautiful animation springs off the pages, igniting the true spirit of Christmas. Follow their emotional journey as we see them combine existing festive traditions with wonderful new ones. In partnership with Make-A-Wish. Featuring "Love Runs Deeper" by Gregory Porter.

Recognizing no boundaries to her love, Angele manages to foment riots, rages and tragedy in colonial Algeria. Angele, an Algerian colonist with impeccably French origins, has fallen in love with Said, the assistant in her brother-in-law's bakery shop. Said is conscious of his Arab origins and traditions, and Angele has her work cut out for her if she wants to persuade him to marry her. Once she does, all hell breaks loose, as neither her European-origin peers nor Said's conservative Arab family approve of the union. When word of the proposed marriage gets out, strikes, violence and murder quickly follow, ruining not only Angele's life, but the lives of those around her. Her brother-in-law Paco, meanwhile, has been doggedly trying to get along and raise his family in an increasingly chaotic and difficult situation.

An ensemble piece set in a North African neighbourhood in Toulon.

27 years after 1962, Antoine returns to Algiers...

In the mountains of Montenegro people have lived by strict and Draconian laws for centuries, almost untouched by modern civilization. However, a young couple are going to seek their fortune on the more liberal coast and there they find jobs in the nudist colony. Hundreds of naked bodies and atmosphere of joie d'vivre make the husband and wife question their rigid way of life.

In 1971 Salford fish-and-chip shop owner George Khan expects his family to follow his strict Pakistani Muslim ways. But his children, with an English mother and having been born and brought up in Britain, increasingly see themselves as British and start to reject their father's rules on dress, food, religion, and living in general.

Bab El-Oued, a popular district of Algiers, in 1989, a few months after the riots. Boualem works at night in a bakery and steals the loudspeaker that was installed on his roof and was broadcasting the Imam's word... therefore preventing him from sleeping. This blunder is taken as a pretext by the Islamists to put the district under their control...

Xiao Xiao is sold into arranged marriage with a 2 year old boy, who she must raise as his nanny until he is old enough to marry her. She is expected to honour tradition and to toe the line so far as social proprieties are concerned, but the young girl rebels against the edicts of her elders until at 16, she falls in love with another man.

At a prestigious all-male university, three friends seek love outside of the school grounds; at the same time, a newly-hired music teacher seeks to befriend and loosen up the militantly strict headmaster.

Headstrong girl Kenza lives with her father Ouira and grandfather Weljo on a car wrecking yard in the countryside of Curaçao. The two men are opposites that don't particularly attract: Ouira is a determined and rational police officer, while Weljo identifies with the original inhabitants and spirituality of the island. As Weljo wishes to prepare his passing to the world of spirits, the relationship between Ouira en Weljo starts to escalate and the eleven-year-old Kenza searches for her own path in-between the two extremes. The down-to-earth and avoidant mentality of Ouira no longer offers her all that she needs and slowly she opens up to the more mystical and comforting traditions of her grandfather.

Emak who wanted a new digital TV because her analog TV service had been cut off, but was not financially able to afford it until her granddaughter Rahma invited her to do Live Streaming on "TokTok".

In the hills of Costa Rica, Doña Carmen struggles to pass on her tribe's traditional ways of life. She must soon marry off her only granddaughter, and 70-year-old shaman Don Claudio lays his claim to the girl, who is only 12 and already impregnated by him. When the girl befriends the young son of a visiting anthropologist, it forces a collision between the modern world and the ancient one.

In a small Jewish community in a pre-Revolutionary Russian village, a poor milkman, determined to find good husbands for his five daughters, consults the traditional matchmaker – and also has words with God.

In a small village, young Mert is about to get traditionally circumcised, but the family does not have the money to follow up with the circumcision celebration. The family wants to be able to serve lamb meat to the guests at the celebration. Mert’s older sister scares him that if they cannot afford a lamb the father will slaughter him instead.

A young Jewish man is torn between tradition and individuality when his old-fashioned family objects to his career as a jazz singer.

At the end of an extraordinary situation in the village, when the people of the village cannot reach the government, they try to break a curse by organizing various rituals under the leadership of the Mukhtar and Kadir. After a while, the government official who comes to the village will confront the villagers with another reality in an authoritarian manner.

A newly-wed man discovers that his wife is in love with another man and decides to unite them. Ignoring the ridicule he might have to face for this, he takes his wife to Italy in search of her love.

On an Algerian beach, kids splash about, sleep, squabble - and then suddenly go to war. And it’s neither Lord of the Flies nor La Guerre des boutons. In her first film, full of grace, Narimane Mari films this childish freefor- all closely, at the irregular pace of an imagination inspired by the highest form of reality, national History — actually, nothing less than the Algerian War of Independence. When their make-believe induces a general upheaval, we follow the flock of children as they stamp their feet up the stairs, invade houses, cross village squares, in a whirlwind of shouts and empty words. Time is stretched like in a dream, through a choreography of belligerent shadows or the night-time explosion of the cemetery, as so many warning signs of dangers to come.

"Yasmina" filmed in 1961 in the middle of the Algerian war tells the story of a little Algerian girl with her hen and her family whose father was killed in a bombing by the French colonial army of occupation. The family, after a long journey, heads towards the refugee camps on the Tunisian border. Produced by the Cinema Service of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA) in the midst of the war of independence, these films were intended to re-inform the population and international public opinion on the abuses committed by the French colonial army: torture, arrests and arbitrary executions, napalm bombings, fires in douars, entire villages wiped off the map, etc. which the French media described as a "pacification" campaign. The latter censoring or reorienting any images that could harm the colonial narrative.