BASHLA

Amos Gitai returns to the occupied territories for the first time since his 1982 documentary FIELD DIARY. WEST OF THE JORDAN RIVER describes the efforts of citizens, Israelis and Palestinians, who are trying to overcome the consequences of occupation. Gitai's film shows the human ties woven by the military, human rights activists, journalists, mourning mothers and even Jewish settlers. Faced with the failure of politics to solve the occupation issue, these men and women rise and act in the name of their civic consciousness. This human energy is a proposal for long overdue change.

A film director from Israel interviews fellow veterans of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to reconstruct his own memories of his term of service in that conflict.

The Israeli filmmaker Shai Corneli Polak records the building of the 'security wall' through Palestinian territory at the village of Bil'in. The villagers protest mostly peacefully, while the Israeli army doesn't react peacefully. By now the Israeli High Court has ruled that the building of the wall was illegal.

Haunted by the killing by Israeli police of a Palestinian friend from his youth, an Israeli queer filmmaker embarks on a cinematic dialogue across time — confronting memory, friendship, and the genocide unfolding today. In this intimate cinematic letter, Israeli filmmaker Roy Cohen addresses his Palestinian friend and fellow peace activist Aseel Aslih, who was murdered by Israeli police in their youth. Cohen tells Aslih of his experiences navigating a growingly genocidal society and seeks Aslih’s moral clarity and resilience in the evocative letters he had written as a teenager.

In 1971, Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE ceased to be part of Britain’s empire in the Middle East and became fully independent states. BBC News Persia and BBC Arabic collaborate in this gripping film, to uncover the secrets and shady deals that underpinned the decolonization process. From eye-witness accounts of a British-organised coup to Iran being left in control of disputed islands, it's a fascinating insight to a murky history.

Chosen and Excluded - Jew Hatred in Europe

When Tehran hosts visiting foreign dignitaries, the local authorities clean up the city’s urban image through the controversial process of ‘urban beautification’. Those who are deemed unsavoury are rounded up – drug users, prostitutes and the homeless who sleep in cardboard boxes on sidewalks and who they would rather remain unseen. When these very important people leave, the men are released but the women are kept as wards of the state. An animated documentary made using hand-crafted cardboard miniatures and the voices of women to tell their story, one that has been five years in the making. A story that shows how the face of a city can change, but what is underneath often does not.

A verité legal drama about Judge Kholoud Al-Faqih, the first woman appointed to a Shari'a court in the Middle East, whose career provides rare insights into both Islamic law and gendered justice.

In May 1974, the Israeli Air Force carried out an extermination operation against the Palestinian refugee camp Nabatiyeh. With this as a starting point, it is reviewed how the last 50 years of Zionist colonization of Palestine have partly led to the establishment of the state of Israel, partly to the expulsion of a people, the Palestinians, from their land. The film shows scenes of daily life in Palestinian refugee camps. We hear various of the inhabitants talk about their desire to return to their country, and we follow how the resistance movement works to free women from their traditional backward role. At the same time, the emergence of the armed resistance struggle is analysed, and the significance of the latest military technological developments for guerilla wars in the 3rd world is explained.

Historian Tom Holland traces the origins of Isis’ barbaric and sadistic violence which it claims is justified by the tenets and scriptures of Islam.

Jim Al-Khalili travels through Syria, Iran, Tunisia and Spain to tell the story of the great leap in scientific knowledge that took place in the Islamic world between the 8th and 14th centuries.

Follows the repercussions of the Israeli Security Wall and Settlement expansion in the engulfed/annexed Palestinian farming communities of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, examining the grassroots resistance movement that sprang up against it. An interminable road trip across hard and liquid borders, across a terrain that is being erased as it is being traversed.

Danna, a young college student, and Yael, a woman with an intellectual disability, are forced to face the difficulties that arise in their love lives. In the end, they realize that their bond with each other is what gives them both the support they need.

What is the reality of daily life in Gaza, along the border of Israel? Can the religious organization of Hamas, rivals to the PLO, move from international pariah to meaningful political player with citizens' interests at heart? Developed over two years and with unprecedented access to this 'terrorist' organization, this documentary uncovers the deeper issues defining life in Gaza under Hamas.

AMIN portrays Qashqai musician Amin Aghaie, a young modern nomad and his family who despite facing steep financial, cultural and political obstacles are dedicated to their art and culture. Amin travels to remote towns and villages to record the music of the surviving masters whose numbers decline each year. His nomadic family are selling their meager belongings to help support their son's education in performance and ethnomusicology at Tchaikovsky's Conservatory in Kyiv, Ukraine, but it is not enough. Amin, desperate to finish his academic education, sells his violins one at a time just to pay for his tuition.

Cuisine libanaise : Chiche ou pois chiche ?

A few years ago, the al-Mahamids fled Bashar al-Assad and Syria to settle in Montreal. A nuanced portrayal of a courageous family coping with a seemingly interminable war, thousands of kilometres away, that continues to affect their lives.

In the Arab world, women are fighting a two-front war against repressive internal constraints and intrusive Western interference. In this program, a feminist delegation composed of author Nawal Saadawi and other renowned activists from the Middle East and North Africa gathers at the UN, on college campuses, and in church basements to speak out about deterioration of women's rights in the Arab states in an effort to heighten awareness of the Arab feminist struggle for equality--and the effects of U.S. foreign policy on their efforts.

The film documents modern slave trade through a number of African countries, under dictatorship rule. The filming was conducted both in public places, and sometimes with the use of hidden cameras, for high impact scenes of nudity, sex, and violence - and a few surprises, as slaves made out of peregrins to Asia, and slave traders paid in traveller checks.

On the verge of the election, the director Avi Mograbi aims to make a documentary on the most maligned Israeli politician, Arik Sharon. Against all his prediction, Mograbi discovers that Sharon is friendly and welcoming, completely different from the man who was thought to be...