In 2015, the Syrian boy Aylan appeared dead on the beach in Bodrum, Turkey. The image shocked and alerted the world to the refugee crisis. The film imagines what would have happened to this child until the day of his death, when the boat in which he was with a family heading to Greece turned on the high seas. The story arises from a moment of magical realism, in which Aylan's spirit emerges from his body and wanders back to the world of refugees and those provoked by war, who escape to escape for a better life.
An ordinary funeral procession moves along its path from church to cemetery. Observing, you slip from reality into a place where time has lost its linearity, looping through the odd images thrown off by a distorted reality. Images of non-existence, of varying reflections of death issuing from both past and future, concrete yet abstract, horrible yet desirable. A family asks a young psychiatrist to be their guest for a while to untangle the circumstances of their father's illness. He's developed a suicidal fixation for ropes and knots among other things. While deeply involved in analyzing the patient's delirium, the doctor begins to lose track of what is taking place. The task of "how to help" is twisted into "who am I? Doctor or patient? Chance guest, member of this suffering family, or a catholic priest who has dreamed this all up?" In order to get a handle on it all, it's best to start from the beginning, but why do things keep shifting, changing?
While visiting a home for children, a little girl meets Joseph, a boy whose only dream is to have a yellow umbrella. This unexpected encounter awakens his memories of the past.
In the mid-1980s, the U.S. is poised on the brink of nuclear war. This shadow looms over the residents of a small town in Kansas as they continue their daily lives. Dr. Russell Oakes maintains his busy schedule at the hospital, Denise Dahlberg prepares for her upcoming wedding, and Stephen Klein is deep in his graduate studies. When the unthinkable happens and the bombs come down, the town's residents are thrust into the horrors of nuclear winter.
Mavka, a water nymph, loves Lukash, a country youth. Their brief happiness ends when Lukash is forced to marry the shrewish Kilina. The Spirit of the Forest turns Lukash into a wolf as punishment for his infidelity. The strength of Mavka's love breaks the spell, but Kilina curses the nymph, transforming her into a weeping willow. This beautiful and tragic story is based on a play written in 1912 by Lesya Ukrainka, a Ukrainian poet, writer and political, civil and female activist, and includes mythological characters taken from Ukrainian folklore.
On a Mediterranean shore, a Syrian father's decision to give his daughter a better life puts her in danger of losing it.
When Mostafa arrives to Ukraine, he witnesses the kidnapping of an Egyptian scientist. Eventually he gets involved in rescuing him, in a country he knows nothing about.
The Pope is in town and the night of his stay is anything but heavenly for some of Berlin′s inhabitants. Rich and poor, down-and-outs and policemen, street kids and taxi drivers - in their search for a little bit of happiness, they all end up on an amusing and at times harrowing odyssey through the labyrinth of the big city.
A nurse from Ukraine searches for a better life in the West, while an unemployed security guard from Austria heads East for the same reason. Both are looking for work, a new beginning, an existence, struggling to believe in themselves, to find a meaning in life...
A young refugee of the Sudanese Civil War who wins a lottery for relocation to the United States with three other lost boys. Encountering the modern world for the first time, they develop an unlikely friendship with a brash American woman assigned to help them, but the young man struggles to adjust to this new life and his feelings of guilt about the brother he left behind.
Turtles Can Fly tells the story of a group of young children near the Turkey-Iraq border. They clean up mines and wait for the Saddam regime to fall.
In Letter to the King we meet a group of refugees, all with their own agendas, on an excursion to Oslo. A young man about to be deported visits his former employers to collect his off-the-books salary, a martial arts expert is looking for work, a young woman is haunted by the past and out for vengeance and an old man named Mirza is busy writing a letter to the king to get his final wish granted. An altogether urgent and nuanced portrait of a motley group of individuals, too often regarded as a homogeneous group.
After making a harrowing escape from war-torn South Sudan, a young refugee couple struggle to adjust to their new life in a small English town that has an unspeakable evil lurking beneath the surface.
On the one hand, there’s the desert eating away at the land. The endless dry season, the lack of water. On the other there’s the threat of war. The village well has run dry. The livestock is dying. Trusting their instinct, most of the villagers leave and head south. Rahne, the only literate one, decides to head east with his three children and Mouna, his wife. A few sheep, some goats, and Chamelle, a dromedary, are their only riches. A tale of exodus, quest, hope and fatality.
After his father is murdered by the Nazis in 1938, a young Viennese Jew named Ferry Tobler flees to Prague, where he joins forces with another expatriate and a sympathetic Czech relief worker. Together with other Jewish refugees, the three make their way to Paris, and, after spending time in a French prison camp, eventually escape to Marseille, from where they hope to sail to a safe port.
In 2015, thirty year old refugee Francis, the sole survivor of a boat that illegally crossed the Mediterranean, is drawn into Berlin's seedy underbelly.
Jakop, a lone fisherman on the coast of lake Peipus has to decide whether refugees brought to his door are his way of redeeming past sins or merely a means to quickly earn much needed cash.
A young Jewish American man endeavors—with the help of eccentric, distant relatives—to find the woman who saved his grandfather during World War II—in a Ukrainian village which was ultimately razed by the Nazis.
After a dangerous sea crossing and a stay in a camp in Malaysia, the young Vietnamese Tinh and her family are accepted as refugees in Canada and arrive in Montreal where they begin their new life. But for Tinh, adapting has its share of difficulties.
Ten years after a terrible disease has killed the majority of the human race, Stanislas Merrick, a former boxing champion, survives alone near a lake. In this world without humanity, his motivation to keep living starts to fade. His meaningless existence will be changed forever when he meets Esther, a teenager running from a refugee camp.