The Age of the Stateless

Bir Avuç Cennet

An epic love story spanning decades is sparked by a chance encounter between two men in provincial Mexico. Based on a true story, ambition and societal pressure propel an aspiring chef to leave his soulmate and make the treacherous journey to New York, where life will never be the same.

This anthology film, whose Chinese title begins with a romantic name for human excrement, premiered internationally at Rotterdam and won Best Screenplay from the Hong Kong Film Critics Society. A variety of Hong Kong people wrestle with nostalgia when facing an uncertain future. Their stories give way to a documentary featuring a young barista turned political candidate.

In the midst of the current crisis in Venezuela, Daniel deals with the difficult decision he had to make. Leaving his family, his girlfriend and his life in his country, while confronting the memories and doubts of what he left behind.

LEI and WONG clandestinely arrive to Ecuador, on their way to the port city of Guayaquil. From here LEI plans to continue her journey to New York, but CHANG, a bipolar mobster will decide her fate. WONG unwillingly gets entangled in the web of corruption that operates the encroachment of Chinese immigrants. His only objective is to bring his twelve-year-old son from China.

Speechless

Sister Tse is brought to New York by a Snakehead, a human smuggler. Although she is indebted to the crime family responsible for her transport, her survival instincts help her gain favor with the matriarch, and she rises quickly in the ranks. Soon Tse must reconcile her success with her real reason for coming to America—to find the child that was taken from her. In the end, Sister Tse must draw on the strength she found in transforming her victimhood into power.

The story of Masoud, who is trying to emigrate to Europe to make a better life for himself, his mother and his fiancé. After embarking on a difficult and dangerous immigration journey with his best friend, Masoud meets a pregnant doctor and an old man on the way and they band together. Having to flee because of war and terror, Masoud tries to reach his goal with a hopeful but painful journey.

ADRIFT- People of a Lesser God is the story of an incredible odyssey made by several-times Pulitzer Prize-nominated undercover reporter Dominique C. Mollard. In this gripping story, Mollard sails with 38 African migrants, among them a five-month-old baby, out of West Africa on a quest to reach the golden shores of Europe. All aboard are packed together like sardines in a leaky fishing canoe as they set off under full moon on their harrowing journey. ADRIFT-People of a Lesser God captures the struggle of these desperate migrants as they brave their way across the cold Atlantic, risking their lives in search for a better future. —Ziad H. Hamzeh

Magdalena makes a journey to find her missing son, who disappeared on his way to the border with the United States. Accompanied only by her will and her memories, Magdalena enters a violent and desolated territory, the migration route in Mexico.

Qazi is the story of a young Pakistani refugee who is forced by economic and family circumstances to seek his fortune in Europe.

Inés discovers that she has a half-sister, but, faced with the situation, decides to accept silence as a family truce.

The protagonists of this docudrama are old farmers who migrated to Banat after the First World War, in 1922. The film is focused on a couple of important events in their impressive lives, which are woven into lively scenes and stories full of wise instances. Their statements become spontaneous recounts of the lives of people in this region.

Sebastián is from Venezuela and arrives at a shelter for migrant minors in Mexico City. There he meets Aurora, a girl from Guatemala, with whom he falls in love. Both are waiting for a response to their asylum application. Time is running out and the farewell is inevitable.

Based on the famous novel of Milos Crnjanski, the story follows Serbian migrations from the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the XVIII century.

Screening of the synonymous Milos Crnjanski's poetic novel about the tragedy of Serbian people who scattered their energy and bones from Dnepr to Lotaringia during XVII and XIX century. The great Serbian migration topic is given through the military campaign of major Vuk Isakovic (Avtandil Makharadze) at the head of Slavonian-Danube regiment, from spring of 1744. to spring of the next year. The second topic follows tragic but passionate relationship between Vuk's younger brother and his wife, which ends with her long-lasting disease and death.

Ramin flees from persecution in Iran and ends up living in the limbo of exile, far from everything he knows, in the tropical port town of Veracruz, Mexico. There his nostalgia and melancholy are confronted with new friendships, while he starts to rediscover his own desires.

Deraldo, a popular poet from Northeast Brazil, arrives in the capital of São Paulo, making a living only from his poetry and pamphlets. All is well until he is mistaken for a multinational worker who killed the boss at a party where he received the title of symbolic worker.

On a ferry travelling towards Lampedusa, we find a teenager on his first day of work as a gravedigger and a boy on his first mission as a diver. They do not know each other, but when they will set foot on the island, both their lives will change forever: one has to retrieve the bodies of drowned shipwreck victims, the other one has to bury them. A sort of dance between life and death, innocence and its loss.

The imprint of the past is made present by the return of three migrants to a community in the upper Mixteca region of Oaxaca, where the three stories intersect.