Daughter of Shanghai

The Lark Farm is set in a small Turkish town in 1915. It deals with the genocide of Armenians, looking closely at the fortunes, or rather, misfortunes of one wealthy Armenian family.

A small time hood smuggles drugs from Turkey to Italy in an effort to make it into the big time, but along the way everyone has to have their cut.

An ex-mercenary turned smuggler. A Mende fisherman. Amid the explosive civil war overtaking 1999 Sierra Leone, these men join for two desperate missions: recovering a rare pink diamond of immense value and rescuing the fisherman's son, conscripted as a child soldier into the brutal rebel forces ripping a swath of torture and bloodshed countrywide.

At the request of the Mexican government, a federal agent and a lady reporter team up to catch a gang that has been smuggling gold from Mexico to the U.S. and then selling it to the U.S. government.

Lichter is an episodic tale from Hans-Christian Schmid about the life on the border between Germany and Poland. The film sheds light on the everyday stories of escape and desperateness.

After her fiancee admits to infidelity while on a business trip in France, a woman attempts to get her lover back and marry him by traveling to Paris despite her crippling fear of flying. On the way she unwittingly smuggles something of value that has a charming crook chasing her across France as she chases after her future husband.

After being sexually assaulted by a well-respected professor, a reclusive Chinese American girl who grew up in an abusive family struggles to find her voice while her mother tells her to be silent.

An exploration of the United States of America's war on drugs from multiple perspectives. For the new head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the war becomes personal when he discovers his well-educated daughter is abusing cocaine within their comfortable suburban home. In Mexico, a flawed, but noble policeman agrees to testify against a powerful general in league with a cartel, and in San Diego, a drug kingpin's sheltered trophy wife must learn her husband's ruthless business after he is arrested, endangering her luxurious lifestyle.

Ella is a divorced Chinese American taxi driver who spends her days ferrying people around the roads of Sausalito, San Francisco. After work, she spends time with her 8-year old son, Scott. Ella meets Mike at Sky House, an infamous pick-up joint. Awkward strangers at first, they nonetheless find passion and what they want in each other.

Though she can spin wild tales of passionate romance, novelist Joan Wilder has no life of her own. Then one day adventure comes her way in the form of a mysterious package. It turns out that the parcel is the ransom she'll need to free her abducted sister, so Joan flies to South America to hand it over. But she gets on the wrong bus and winds up hopelessly stranded in the jungle.

Disgraced pro football quarterback Paul Crewe lands in a Texas federal penitentiary, where manipulative Warden Hazen recruits him to advise the institution's football team of prison guards. Crewe suggests a tune-up game which lands him quarterbacking a crew of inmates in a game against the guards. Aided by incarcerated ex-NFL coach and player Nate Scarborough, Crewe and his team must overcome not only the bloodthirstiness of the opposition, but also the corrupt warden trying to fix the game against them.

Captain Khorshid is a sailor who although only having one hand, manages to sail his little boat. In his village, due to its hot climate and hard living conditions, dangerous criminals are sent into exile. They want to escape from the area, so they ask a middleman to strike a deal with Khorshid. Khorshid is asked to illegally take them out of the country with his boat. At first he is reluctant, but because of the hardships of living he accepts the job.

During the '80s, a young man named Frankie dreams of escaping London's South East region, and his mother's thug of a boyfriend gives him just the opportunity. After beating up the abusive beau, Frankie runs off to Spain, where he lands a job delivering a package to the dapper Playboy Charlie, a gangster who takes him under his wing. Working as Charlie's driver, Frankie is immersed in a world of fast cars and pretty women -- but all the excess could be his undoing.

A nobleman with a literary flair, the Marquis de Sade lives in a madhouse where a beautiful laundry maid smuggles his erotic stories to a printer, defying orders from the asylum's resident priest. The titillating passages whip all of France into a sexual frenzy, until a fiercely conservative doctor tries to put an end to the fun.

Das Herz von St. Pauli

Shadows over St. Pauli

When Hamburg ship's mate Klaus Brandt catches a thief one night at the port, his downfall is pre-ordained. For the thief turns out to be a young, attractive woman and the otherwise upright sailor allows her to slip away. Jenny is the star of a local dive bar, with a side-line in smuggling.

The crew of a bankrupt Scottish trawler turn to smuggling illegal immigrants over the stormy waters of the North Sea.

Two youths, Niño and Compi, enter the world of drug smuggling in the Strait of Gibraltar; while two police officers, Jesús and Eva, try to eradicate the contraband.

Around the film hang fascinating questions about border politics, which I’ll touch on in an introduction before the screening. One of Eugene Buck’s motivations for making the film may have been his rough cross-examination during his kidnappers’ first trials, in October 1913, when defense attorneys cast him as a confused and unreliable witness against idealistic freedom fighters. On film he could reproduce the pursuit, the shootouts, his kidnapping, and his friend’s murder just as he had testified. Reenacting the crime on film may have been the best revenge—and a way to honor the sacrifice of Deputy Ortiz, a twenty-year police veteran and, for the era, a rare Mexican American lawman.