In 2019, the multi-awarded filmmaker Nahid Persson Sarvestani (My Stolen Revolution, Prostitution Behind the Veil) filmed the Iranian journalist based in France Roholla Zam, who exposed the Iranian regime money laundering. Months later, Rohollah was lured by moles to Iraq and kidnapped to Iran. After 14 months in prison, he was executed.
In search of inspiration and new topics, the famous metropolitan writer Kim Yesenin goes to the province. Unexpectedly for himself, he discovers that here people live very differently than in the world familiar to him. By chance, he witnesses someone else's love drama - intellectual Sasha and dissident Andrei who is leaving for America. He is shocked by this complex conflict and fictitious problems, where there is no place for either melancholy or depression. In this situation, the hero decides to go to Moscow...
Iran 1979. The Islamic Revolution is shaking up the country. Dissident Omid, who lived for several years in the German Democratic Republic with his wife, chemical engineer Beate and their mutual daughter, hears the call from his homeland and returns to Teheran with high hopes and best intentions, bringing along his family.
Half blind and half deaf, ostraziced Cuban writer Rafael Alcides tries to finish his unpublished novels to discover that after several decades, the home made ink from the typewriter he used to write them has faded. The Cuban revolution as a love story and eventual deception is seen through the eyes of a man who is living an inner exile.
It’s the last dictatorship of Europe, caught in a Soviet time-warp, where the secret police is still called the KGB and the president rules by fear. Disappearances, political assassinations, waves of repression and mass arrests are all regular occurances. But while half of Belarus moves closer to Russia, the other half is trying to resist…
When the Chinese Communist Party backtracks on its promise of autonomy to Hong Kong, teenager Joshua Wong decides to save his city. Rallying thousands of kids to skip school and occupy the streets, Joshua becomes an unlikely leader in Hong Kong and one of China’s most notorious dissidents.
The heroic story of a dictator who risks his life to ensure that democracy would never come to the country he so lovingly oppressed.
Igor, who manages a fancy hotel and is on the take, has to juggle several problems at once. He has a two-hour window to get his ill-got gain out of the hotel, he must misdirect and obstruct the inquiries of a Party auditor who suspects that all is not above board, and he must keep out of sight and out of trouble his interloping and troublesome young brother-in-law, who arrives unannounced with barrels of rotten herring.
An account of the many tribulations that Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, known for his subversive art and political activism, endured between 2008 and 2011, from his rise to world fame via the Internet to his highly publicized arrest due to his frequent and daring confrontations with the Chinese authorities.
An anti-western propaganda film about the influences of American visual and consumption culture on the rest of the world, as told from a North Korean perspective.
In a near future in Brazil, a totalitarian regime forces the elderly into residences where they extract memories from their brains to train an AI system. Horrified by this new reality, one man escapes one of the residences and joins a guerrilla cell led by fellow dissidents over 75.
Victor Fainberg. Madly in Dissent
Choosing the fate of a rock musician was similar to being a dissident. From the 60s, the Soviet Union tried to discourage and restrict the expansion of rock music by any means. They called it the “rotten fruit of degraded capitalism, demoralizing the minds of Soviet youth”. Despite that, rock music broke the wall – made a hole in the Iron Curtain – and gained the hearts and minds of tens of thousands of young people.Rock musicians were on the frontline of the rebellion against the Soviet regime. Despite censorship, they managed to deliver, in a hidden, roundabout way through lyrics and music, the spirit of nonconformity and freedom of choice to their audience. A film about Latvian and Soviet rock pioneers, their lives and destinies.
A touching drama about a love triangle between a young architect, Koroku, and two women, Ranko and Teruko. Ranko comes from a wealthy family and is offering to repay Koroku’s family debts in exchange for marriage, but Koroku is in love with his landlord’s daughter, Teruko. Things are further complicated when the wicked Tsugawa takes interest in both women, for his own marriage.
Over the course of one night, a newly out-of -the-closet young man struggles to hold back his feelings for his straight best friend while dealing with the problems and complications of being different in a hetero-normative world.
As a nun, Katharina von Bora lives the life destined for her until she comes into contact with a completely new world of thought in the early 20s through the writings of Martin Luther. She flees with some of her co-sisters and comes without legal status, without income and rejected by her family to Wittenberg, where she meets Martin Luther personally. Katharina decides to marry the reformer and, as his wife, becomes a respected housekeeper, an equal interlocutor and the mother of their children together.
According to true events, the moving drama "The Children of Villa Emma" tells of a dangerous escape that took place during the Second World War. In 1942/1943, the Italian village of Nonantola was indeed a refuge for 73 Jewish children who wanted to escape the merciless access of the National Socialists on their way to the "Promised Land" of Palestine. Director Nikolaus Leytner describes the dangerous journey as an exciting test, presented by a talented young cast.
Tells the story of Antonia(Jella Haase), who survived the 2010 Love Parade tragedy in Duisburg and how she is dealing with her life after the incident in which 21 people lost their life and more than 500 got injured.
Claire and David have been happily married for years, but there seems to be a curse on their marriage. They have been trying to have a child for a long time, but unfortunately without success. When David dies unexpectedly, Claire's life is thrown into complete chaos. But as she tries to come to terms with the loss, she suddenly discovers dark secrets that cast her husband in a completely new light: the respected aid worker was apparently involved in dirty business in Africa. And then for years he has also kept it from Claire that he has been having regular sex with the call girl Sabina. Suddenly more and more strange things are happening and Claire suddenly feels persecuted. Could David have been murdered? If so, who has something to cover up? And what did David's assistant Michael know? For Claire's psychiatrist and David's confidant Hagedorn, these are just delusions. But who can the widow trust now?