Something from there is a short film on the substance of our original lands. Weaving between the voices of the artist’s parents, one a refugee and the other not, the film is personal, yet evokes a shared Palestinian experience.
Social & External
The people behind it
Α quarter of the global population of school age lives in war zones or disaster areas. Fewer than one in four underage refugees attends secondary school. Only one in twenty enrolls for university. Less than two per cent of global humanitarian aid is spent on education. This is the story of four refugee children living in different countries, and a documentation of their daily struggle to obtain a formal education.
OBAIDA, a short film by Matthew Cassel, explores a Palestinian child’s experience of Israeli military arrest. Each year, some 700 Palestinian children undergo military detention in a system where ill-treatment is widespread and institutionalized. For these young detainees, few rights are guaranteed, even on paper. After release, the experience of detention continues to shape and mark former child prisoners’ path forward.
Guy Hircefeld, a veteran who served in the Israeli military at the start of its occupation of Palestine in the 1980s, now fights against the Israeli occupation. His only weapon is a camera.
Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War presents the first-hand recollections of IDF soldiers who have broken official silence to share their experiences of the war in Gaza - accounts that may raise serious questions about conduct on the ground and potential breaches of international law. Directed by award-winning filmmaker Ben Zand, the film features exclusive interviews with Israel Defense Forces (IDF), reservists and veterans - many speaking for the first time - who served during the war in Gaza. Their testimonies describe what they recall as indiscriminate bombardment, instances where Palestinian civilians were used as human shields, and an operational culture that some soldiers characterised as “no innocents in Gaza.”
Going behind the usual images of war-torn Gaza, Swiss documentarian Nicolas Wadimoff offers this look at how people survive despite constant threat of danger. Children still play, rappers still create music and families still love one another. In addition to visiting the United Nations Food Distribution Center, Wadimoff films at a derelict amusement park and profiles the DARG TeaM rappers, whose politically charged music proclaims their defiance.
Peter LeDonne and Steve Kalafer chronicle the extraordinary life of Immaculée Ilibagiza, a young African woman who escaped genocide in Rwanda and ultimately found refuge in the United States. Seeking shelter with an Episcopalian minister, Immaculée hid from her attackers inside a bathroom for three long months but stayed centered through prayer and faith.
London students and academics protest the genocide in Gaza.
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.
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.
The documentary is a five country-based sequences featuring stories about conflict, migration and the experience of exile; Tibetan women refugees in Dharamshala, India, Syrian refugee family in Tunisia, evicted indigenous women in the Phlippines; Rohingya women in Haryana and Delhi, and Syrian women refugees in Canada.
In July 1988, Mizue Furui was in the Gaza Strip and West Bank with her camera as a rookie freelance journalist. Covering the Palestinian condition, she became acquainted with Ghada Ageel, a 23-year-old teacher at an elementary school, in November 1993 and started shooting her life up to when she turned 35. The 12 years Furui spent shooting still and video images has borne fruit in a documentary titled "Ghada -- Songs of Palestine," which will be released in Uplink Theater in Shibuya Ward, Tokyo, in May as a rare report on women in the traditionally male-oriented Palestinian society.
Declassified presents the first documentary about Britain's complicity in the Gaza genocide, exposing Keir Starmer's shady spy flight missions for Israel. What does a British base in Cyprus have to do with Israel's genocide in Gaza? Declassified travelled to this Mediterranean island to investigate the hundreds of spy flights Keir Starmer has sent over Gaza, that coincided with Israeli airstrikes and the killing of British aid workers We go where the British media and military experts have refused to look and ask whether this scandal could put Keir Starmer in The Hague.
An estimated 12 million people live in refugee camps worldwide and only 0.1% are resettled, repatriated, or integrated into normal society each year. The feature-length documentary.
Free Fish is a short documentary filmed over the course of a year in Gaza, following two brothers — Abu Nagham and Ahmad — separated by war yet connected by the sea. Displaced from their home, Abu Nagham now lives in a tent in the south, fishing with his young nephew Rami, who lost his twin brother. Ahmad remains in the north, fishing amid ruins and occupation. Once a source of livelihood and freedom, the sea has become a battleground — heavily restricted, constantly watched, and always dangerous.
Seven militant women (fedaiyat) of the revolutionary generation tell the story of the Palestinian resistance through accounts of their own lives. Cut from 35 hours of interviews with leaders of the armed struggle, the film presents an image of confident, unapologetic and proud feminine identity. Together, the memories of these women narrate the dream of a generation, yet unrealized.
A Palestinian activist's fight for freedom draws a Japanese American filmmaker into confrontation with detention regimes of past and present.
This documentary, filmed after October 7, places recent events in context and retraces the extraordinary history of this region to shed light on the present, interviewing actors and witnesses to this conflict: Islamists, Jewish nationalists, imams, rabbis, intellectuals, urban planners, soldiers, etc.
Dublin, June 2024: thousands of men seeking asylum in Ireland are homeless. Olivia and her group of volunteers are trying to find safe locations where the men can sleep each night, but the government is actively enforcing its new policy against homeless encampments, and the far-right are lurking.
Australian filmmaker Sophia Turkiewicz investigates why her Polish mother abandoned her and uncovers the truth behind her mother's wartime escape from a Siberian gulag, leaving Sophia to confront her own capacity for forgiveness.
More than 65 million people around the world have been forced from their homes to escape famine, climate change and war, the greatest displacement since World War II. Filmmaker Ai Weiwei examines the staggering scale of the refugee crisis and its profoundly personal human impact. Over the course of one year in 23 countries, Weiwei follows a chain of urgent human stories that stretch across the globe, including Afghanistan, France, Greece, Germany and Iraq.
Fourteen years after his first visit, Louis Theroux meets some of the growing community of religious-nationalist Israelis who have settled in the occupied West Bank.
A love letter from a young mother to her daughter, the film tells the story of Waad al-Kateab’s life through five years of the uprising in Aleppo, Syria as she falls in love, gets married and gives birth to Sama, all while cataclysmic conflict rises around her. Her camera captures incredible stories of loss, laughter and survival as Waad wrestles with an impossible choice– whether or not to flee the city to protect her daughter’s life, when leaving means abandoning the struggle for freedom for which she has already sacrificed so much.
An unprecedented and intimate look at the life, work and enduring legacy of British actress Audrey Hepburn (1929-1993).
This special explores the return of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker to the screen, as well as Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen to their classic roles. Director Deborah Chow leads the cast and crew as they create new heroes and villains that live alongside new incarnations of beloved Star Wars characters, and an epic story that dramatically bridges the saga films.
An inside look at one of the most anticipated movie sequels ever with James Cameron and cast.
A documentary on the expletive's origin, why it offends some people so deeply, and what can be gained from its use.
Over 35 years after Bob Lazar's revelations, this documentary exposes secrets of a facility the government still denies. Featuring Lazar's testimony, recreations, and new evidence, it reopens a case that continues to spark global curiosity
Through deeply personal interviews with her siblings and an examination of the photographs, letters, and belongings left behind, Mariska assembles a new portrait of her mother Jayne Mansfield, an extraordinary and complex woman.
After another 7 year wait, director Michael Apted revisits the same group of British-born children from Seven Up! and 7 Plus Seven. The subjects are interviewed as to the changes that have occurred in their lives during the last seven years.
Stars of "The Walking Dead," Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira, walk down memory lane and visit iconic locations where pivotal moments between their characters, Rick and Michonne, were filmed.
A documentary about the making of season five of the acclaimed AMC series Breaking Bad.
Using the book 'Fragments', which collects Marilyn Monroe's poems, notes and letters, and with participation from the Arthur Miller and Truman Capote estates who have contributed more material, each of the actresses will embody the legend at various stages in her life.
A string of threatening emails escalates into a revenge plot involving a newly married US marshal and his ex-girlfriend.
Police pull over a woman who claims she just gave birth. But the baby — and the blood — aren't hers. Twisted lies unravel in this true-crime documentary.
Five broken cameras – and each one has a powerful tale to tell. Embedded in the bullet-ridden remains of digital technology is the story of Emad Burnat, a farmer from the Palestinian village of Bil’in, which famously chose nonviolent resistance when the Israeli army encroached upon its land to make room for Jewish colonists. Emad buys his first camera in 2005 to document the birth of his fourth son, Gibreel. Over the course of the film, he becomes the peaceful archivist of an escalating struggle as olive trees are bulldozed, lives are lost, and a wall is built to segregate burgeoning Israeli settlements.
Amber Heard and Nicole Kidman discuss their characters Mera and Atlanna.
Director Michael Apted revisits the same group of British-born adults after a 7 year wait. The subjects are interviewed as to the changes that have occurred in their lives during the last seven years.
As a visually radical memoir, CAMERAPERSON draws on the remarkable footage that filmmaker Kirsten Johnson has shot and reframes it in ways that illuminate moments and situations that have personally affected her. What emerges is an elegant meditation on the relationship between truth and the camera frame, as Johnson transforms scenes that have been presented on Festival screens as one kind of truth into another kind of story—one about personal journey, craft, and direct human connection.
Ranjit, a farmer in India, takes on the fight of his life when he demands justice for his 13-year-old daughter, the victim of a brutal gang rape. His decision to support his daughter is virtually unheard of, and his journey unprecedented.