No Roads In

An abandoned homestead, twelve songs and five days to cut an album. A journey into how the power of music transforms our life.

Obscura

While working with wet plate collodion Ruhter came up with an idea to show the world the beauty of these objects in a size that was deemed impossible. This led him and the Silver & Light Team to a forgotten town on the edge of the Salton Sea called Bombay Beach, located in California’s Imperial Valley. The idea was to create a camera out of an abandoned house. The structure would serve as the framework for the camera. Instead of focusing on the decay from the outside, this house camera allowed a view from the inside into someone’s dream. Once the giant lens was placed on the front of the house, images of Ted, a 100 year old resident who recently found himself homeless, were projected in, breathing new life into this abandoned structure and once again making it a home. During this brief moment in time when Ted’s photograph was captured, he was present in both places. In reality, he was homeless in the outside world.

Farmingville

Documentary on the attempted murder of two Mexican day laborers in Farmingville, New York.

Waiting for Barcelona

Waiting for Barcelona revolves around the struggles of undocumented immigrants collecting scrap metal and selling illegal replicas in Barcelona. The film centers on the idea of how the dream of the city is very similar to everyone, but in practice differs depending on your wealth and citizenship. Without the right documents for working our protagonists face serious difficulties and even end up on the verge of insanity.

The Pirate Tapes

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.

Travelers

The diaspora of Filipinos around the globe is driven mostly by the economics of supply and demand. The yearning for something better, stability, and self-validation leads a handful of sojourners from the provinces of the Philippines into the arms of one of its former colonial masters — the USA. But what happens when they finally get what they want? And how? Filmmaker Dennis Empalmado explores the musings of Filipino expatriates and hopeful immigrants in "Naglalakbay" (Travelers).

Golden Land

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.

Band of Exile

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.

A Land Betrayed

Produced by Alfred Higgins Productions with assistance from the University of Missouri-Columbia’s Academic Support Center Film Library, Keep America Beautiful, Inc., and Keep Los Angeles Beautiful, Inc., the 1963 short film A Land Betrayed examines the various ways people have spread the “cancer of ugliness” across America and offers call-to-action solutions to combat the nation-wide problem.

Don't Tell Anyone (No Le Digas A Nadie)

In a community where silence is seen as necessary for survival, undocumented immigrant activist Angy Rivera joins a generation of Dreamers in a quest to come out of the shadows and claim her place in the only home she's ever known.

The Fields of Immokalee

For decades, migrant workers have worked the fields of Immokalee, harvesting tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, oranges and other produce that is then shipped across the United States of America. Many of the workers are undocumented, and attempting to keep their jobs even as federal migration crackdowns hover over the town. The Fields of Immokalee film follows the daily lives of tomato workers, from the 5:00am trips to the parking lot in hopes of finding day labor, to work sessions in the scorching mid-day heat, to child detention centers for migrant youth that have been separated from their families. Via these vignettes, the film offers insight into the most volatile political issue of our time.

The President vs. the Pirates

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.

America; I Too

Three arrested and detained undocumented immigrants must navigate the system to fight impending deportation.

Se Shin Sa

"Se Shin Sa" is a hybrid of fiction and documentary portraying an undocumented immigrant woman living and working as a masseuse in Korean town, L.A.

E4FC - 2013 San Francisco Foundation Community Leadership Awards

The San Francisco Foundation presents 2013 Community Leadership Awardee, Educators for Fair Consideration (E4FC), with The San Francisco Foundation Award, made to an organization demonstrating exemplary commitment to improving human relations in the Bay Area. E4FC provides direct support to and advocacy for highly motivated, college-bound undocumented students who had come to the United States as children and wished to remain. They are a leader in the field of immigrant work, providing youth tangible support and the space for them to tell their own story. As a result, E4FC's work is an essential part of the DREAMers movement catapulting the organizations role as a leader in both the Bay Area and as a national model in supporting and empowering immigrant youth. www.sff.org/cla

All this Roughness

An unnamed passer-by is forced to trace a circular route inside an abandoned tram station, facing loss and time. The broken walls act as a channel, transmitting fragmentary, blurred and analogical memories. 

Undocumented in the Pandemic

With The Marshall Project and the Pulitzer Center, a look at one immigrant mother’s struggle to keep her children safe and housed, with her husband detained by ICE in a facility where COVID is spreading. Also in this two-part hour, Love, Life & the Virus.

In search of urbex

There are places in the world that are forgotten by everyone, places where time seems to have stopped, where nature seems to have won the battle. These places are the playgrounds of modern-day adventurers called urbexers. They explore, discover, and photograph the most emblematic abandoned sites in France with a single leitmotif: to prevent them from falling into oblivion forever.

Q's Barbershop

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!

La Ballade des sans-papiers