The Cloud-Capped Star

India. Smita is an untouchable. She dreams of seeing her daughter escape her miserable condition and enter school. Italy. Giulia works in her father’s workshop. When he has an accident, she discovers that the family business is ruined. Canada. Sarah, a successful lawyer, is about to be promoted to the head of her firm when she learns that she is ill. Three lives, three women, three continents. Three battles to fight. Although they don’t know each other, Smita, Giulia and Sarah are unknowingly linked by their most intimate and singular bond.

As a young couple stops and rests in a small village inn, the man is abducted by Death and is sequestered behind a huge doorless, windowless wall. The woman finds a mystic entrance and is met by Death, who tells her three separate stories set in exotic locales, all involving circumstances similar to hers.

Set in Isaan, this is the story of a mother who struggles to lead her needy family through seemingly endless hardships and pressures. To help the family survive, the father endures greedy capitalists who heartlessly take advantage of him and his family, forcing him to slave at the harvest of an infertile field. That is until he loses both his arms. Then all the burdens fall on the mother: bread-winning, taking care of her crippled husband and raising the kids, all amid external pressures from drought to vile businessmen.

Refugees in a post-apocalyptic future, two sisters must make the ultimate decision: one or both will die.

The Vietnamese Nghi has a bad feeling as she sees the foreign Chinese groom for the first time on the day of her daughter’s wedding. Nghi and Phuong decided that the 17 years old should get married to relieve the family of their debts. But then, the bride disappears after the ceremony and the mother faces the decision what she is ready to give for her family's happiness.

Shopping malls - today's place of creating desires. Best jewelry, clothes, shoes. Unaffordable by young girls, but they "work" to get themselves sponsors for new items.

Anne doesn't have enough money to take her daughter, Mélody, away from the small provincial town where they live for a few days during the summer holidays. In the face of her daughter's disappointment and incomprehension, she does all she can to find the money.

Set in the early 1990’s, a critical period in Malaysian Indian history, the story subtly underlines the plight of the Indian Malaysians. Forsaken by the estate owners who had employed them for generations and systematically marginalized, they are forced to move to the cities and survive under harsh circumstances. Left out of the nation’s urbanization and development plans, many live in squatters and work at minimum wage jobs…

Marius is a highly successful lawyer based in Vilnius. He becomes obsessed with Ali, a handsome Syrian refugee he first encounters in an online chatroom run out of Belgrade. Marius is rich and enjoys a vibrant social and cultural life. Nevertheless, he feels that something is missing from it. The journey from Lithuania to Serbia is a relatively short one, but can the two navigate their way through the gulf that separates their very different lives? And how do they deal with the precarious obstacles of the physical borders that stand between them? Written and directed by Romas Zabarauskas, The Lawyer questions assumptions about what it means to be an immigrant and the possibilities offered by life in contemporary Europe.

The lives of several individuals in the city criss-cross, thanks to children, who offer them a chance at redemption.

African-American Philadelphia police detective Virgil Tibbs is arrested on suspicion of murder by Bill Gillespie, the racist police chief of tiny Sparta, Mississippi. After Tibbs proves not only his own innocence but that of another man, he joins forces with Gillespie to track down the real killer. Their investigation takes them through every social level of the town, with Tibbs making enemies as well as unlikely friends as he hunts for the truth.

In the late 19th century, two Swedish emigrants, Lasse Karlsson and his son Pelle, arrive on the Danish island of Bornholm hoping to find work on a farm and save enough money to travel to the United States of America.

After being released from prison, Billy Skinner returns to his low-income neighbourhood feeling like a fish out of water; the area has changed dramatically, and what was once a predominantly white neighbourhood is now mostly occupied by refugee families.

A Peruvian teen lusts after his wild sister while the new wife of their difficult, wealthy father tries to hide her lower-class background.

A school in a remote village gets a swimming coach who turns the fortunes of its students.

8-year-old Ali lives in a refugee detention centre with his mother and little sister Fatima. When his mother's precious knitting needles are confiscated, Ali is forced to take action. Desperate to save his family, he hatches a plan using a ball and the help of a girl on the other side of the razor-wire fence.

A man fails to acknowledge the teenagers he mistreated when they were small children.

A luxury hotel in a conflict zone. Development aid worker Dorothea begins an affair with a young drifter, Alec, but what starts as sweet distraction brings her dangerously close to losing control.

Apu is a jobless ex-student dreaming vaguely of a future as a writer. An old college friend talks him into a visit up-country to a village wedding. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 1996.

Aparajito picks up where the first film leaves off, with Apu and his family having moved away from the country to live in the bustling holy city of Varanasi (then known as Benares). As Apu progresses from wide-eyed child to intellectually curious teenager, eventually studying in Kolkata, we witness his academic and moral education, as well as the growing complexity of his relationship with his mother. This tenderly expressive, often heart-wrenching film, which won three top prizes at the Venice Film Festival, including the Golden Lion, not only extends but also spiritually deepens the tale of Apu. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 1996.