The Countryside and the City

Amidst a global exodus from earth, two brothers must confront their differences about leaving their home forever.

Patrolman Loyan tries to find his place in the new police department while keeping his friend Warsame, newly released from prison, on the right track. Loyan's ambition is to get into detective training, but his supervisor Jokisalo thinks he'd be better off patrolling the familiar neighbourhoods with his partner Johanna. The patrol gets down to business when they start investigating what looks like a suicide. Antero Päiviö, a professional criminal and racial bigot involved in drug trafficking, has jumped from his balcony. The man who was first pronounced dead suddenly wakes up and is taken to hospital. Loyan finds it hard to believe the man's story and decides to find out the truth at any cost. As the plot unravels, it's hard to know who to trust anymore, when Warsame seems to be up to something behind Loyan's back.

When a Somali immigrant joins an adult ESL class, he romantically pursues an uninterested classmate all while navigating the many challenges of the modern immigrant experience.

Tells the true story of Ramla Ali, who fled Somalia with her family as a young girl, seeking asylum in London from the civil war. As a teenager, she pursued her love of boxing, but did so secretly as she knew her family would disapprove. Ali became the first boxer, male or female, to represent Somalia at the 2020 Olympic Games and made history after winning the first ever professional female boxing match in Saudi Arabia.

The true story of Captain Richard Phillips and the 2009 hijacking by Somali pirates of the US-flagged MV Maersk Alabama, the first American cargo ship to be hijacked in two hundred years.

Samia Yusuf Omar is just 9 years old when she discovers her special talent: she is faster than all the other boys and girls. With her friend Ali, who is the same age, she has the goal to earn real money with running and become famous. The children make a pact: Ali becomes Samia's coach. With his help, Samia is to become a real champion. But the ongoing civil war makes life in Mogadishu increasingly difficult...

A 15-year-old Somalian boy meets a 40-year-old Iranian man in a refugee camp in Skåne, in the south of Sweden. With the threat of deportation hanging over them, they decide to take their faiths in their own hands and together they go on a journey in the Swedish summer.

In 1998 Finland, a 10-year-old Somali girl navigates life through her love of pop music, dance, and Leonardo DiCaprio.

When men take up arms to go against their brothers, women have to take up gravediggers’ shovels. Ceebla (Fardouza Moussa Egueh, who we also saw in Gravedigger’s Wife), refuses to bargain for the cost of her labour. When her grave finally finds a taker, the revenue logic takes an unexpected twist. The Earth Has Ears is a civil war film without gunfire. It shows how the absurdity of war also turns everyday life at the home front irrational. / MSFF

Here in Toronto, four young Somali refugees are finishing high school. What did they bring with them? What did they find in Canada? Their testimonies, about us and about themselves, interspersed with newsreel footage and sequences of a theatrical creation in which they put all their soul, make them immediately endearing and overturn many prejudices held against refugees. A film that makes you want to get to know them better.

When Finnish-Somalian Mustafe discovers his ancestors’ land in the horn of Africa is full of copper and gold, he decides to swap his family’s safe but boring life in the Nordics for Somaliland, a self-declared state in East Africa. As Mustafe struggles to lift the treasures from underground, his children embark on a bumpy journey to uncover where they really belong.

Abdul & Hamza, two Somali immigrants, are hiding in an abandoned house near Serbo-Romanian border.

The make or break story of a Somali-Australian refugee who went back to where he came from to do battle with ruthless pirates and Islamic militants - and transform his broken homeland into a modern African State.

A colourful, upbeat tale from Vollsmose about the resourceful and funky hairdresser Qasim, who instils dignity, inspiration and hope in young people through something we can all relate to – a cool haircut!

Exposing piracy in Somalia from the inside out, The Pirates Tapes follows Mohamed Ashareh, a young Somali-Canadian, as he travels to Somalia in hopes of joining an active pirate cell. Armed only with a hidden camera, Mohamed works his way into a cell run by a ruthless warlord, Jama Donyal, and is assigned to his first hijacking mission. When things take an unexpected turn, Mohamed finds himself on the run from the law with the danger of execution looming.

Patrolled by desperate gunmen looking to capture any vessel that strays into their path, the waters off East Africa are among the most dangerous in the world. With Somali pirates continuing to make headlines, this timely documentary tells the story of the US container ship Maersk Alabama, which was stormed by bandits in April 2009. With the captain taken hostage, the unarmed crew made the remarkable decision to confront the gun-toting invaders in a brave attempt to save their skipper and the ship. Now, using dramatic recreations and interviews with the crew and their families, this exclusive one-hour special reveals the incredible events that took place over those few days.

The day Kara turned 18, he had to lose everything, a gift from his grandfather that he would never forget in his lifetime. Taken in by a family who believes he is poor, he works towards supporting himself and new relationships.

In the first half of the 19th century there was a revolt in the central state of Hesse, led by Georg Büchner (Gregor Hansen), the well-known German writer, and a fellow rebel, Pastor Weidig (Franz Wittich). Büchner wrote a kind of declaration of peasant rights against the tyranny of the landholders of the time, and once that declaration ("Der Hessische Landbote") was made public, Büchner escaped to Strasbourg, and then to Zurich where he was killed in 1937, at the age of 23. Pastor Weidig was captured, sent to prison, tortured, and killed in prison. The revolution the two men had hoped for died on the vine due to an informer -- a planned uprising was brutally squelched -- and the peasants had to bide their time for another 12 years before the 1848 Revolution would bring them some of the rights demanded in Büchner's pamphlet.

A poor widowed farmer, Dharma Singh, raises two children, a boy (Karan) and a girl (Geeta) on his own in a town called Rampur, and would like his son to grow up to be a police officer. Alas, that was not to be so, for heavy torrential rains strikes their region, separating the entire family, leaving Dharma wounded, and the two children ending up in a town called Sitapur. Geeta decides to work so that her brother can study. Her brother re-locates to Bombay city, and subsequently studies well, and becomes a Police Inspector. He is assigned his first major assignment to get rid of bandits near Sitapur, which he accepts, little knowing that the very people he is expected to get rid of are his very own sister, who is now a former jailbird, a notorious bandit who calls herself "Maut", and at odds with another bandit known as Daku Dharma Singh, who is none other than her father. Will Karan be able to fulfill his duties or will he end up joining his family in a life of crime.

A 20-year old young man who has been brought up by a foster mother in the countryside has fallen in love with another foster child in the same "family" and the two have decided to get married. Just after this decision, the young man's real mother contacts him and asks him to come and stay with her and his father (she is a high-ranking Party official). She is against his marriage but her husband is not. In the end, the young man decides to marry at the home of his real parents, and when his foster mother shows up, his real mother treats her like dirt - it turns out that the foster mother was a concubine for awhile. Before things deteriorate any further, the husband has some news for his wife that helps her to see the foster mother in a different light.