Migration and Culture

In Israel’s occu­pied ter­ri­to­ries, thou­sands of Pales­tini­ans work ille­gal­ly as con­struc­tion labour­ers. At night they sleep on the hill­crests in impro­vised huts and sleep­ing cubi­cles, a stark con­trast to the … read more

The doc­u­men­tary FROM FAR AWAY shows film­mak­er Thomas Arslan’s jour­ney back to the coun­try of his origin after twenty years: Arslan and his small team set out in the coun­try’s … read more

They are called “nobod­ies”, Span­ish “nadie”: migrants that cross Mexico on their way to the United States. They travel with­out papers in order to avoid being sent back when stopped … read more

East London Muslim girl Sha­ha­nara is chang­ing from pink hot­pants into a saree, to meet her hus­band at the air­port. She has only met him once before, when she was … read more

A family tale – ordi­nary, crazy and excep­tion­al at the same time. A film about exile and home, about par­ents, grand­par­ents, sib­lings and all the other close and dis­tant rela­tions … read more

In Jan­u­ary of 2004, in the north­ern Moroc­can city of Tang­iers, first time doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er Saeed Taji Farouky met a 26 year-old Moroc­can named Abdelfat­tah. He was a clan­des­tine, one of many Africans who try to cross the narrow Straits of Gibral­tar and ille­gal­ly enter Spain by stow­ing away on cargo ships or board­ing inflat­able rafts. By the end of their first meet­ing, Abdelfat­tah had agreed to let Saeed follow him to film every aspect of his jour­ney, includ­ing his deal­ings with people-smug­glers, his strug­gle to raise the 750 Euro fee, and his final days with his family before leav­ing. I SEE THE STARS AT NOON offers a unique and reveal­ing insight into Abdelfattah’s des­per­ate attempt to reach Europe. At times humor­ous and dis­turb­ing, it inti­mate­ly exam­ines the cir­cum­stances that lead him to risk every­thing for an utter­ly uncer­tain future: his ambi­tions for a new life, his expec­ta­tions of what Europe can offer him, and his frus­tra­tion at the fail­ures of his own Moroc­co. But I SEE THE STARS AT NOON is not only a por­trait of a hope­ful immi­grant; it is also an explo­ration of the nature of doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ing and objec­tiv­i­ty. The rela­tion­ship between film­mak­er and sub­ject is thrown into ques­tion when Abdelfat­tah asks why his life is being filmed for the ben­e­fit of Euro­pean audi­ences, and what he deserves in return. 

Michale Boganim’s lyri­cal doc­u­men­tary picks up on the theme of van­ish­ing Jewish cul­ture. The three part film depics a jour­ney from the Ukraine to ‘Little Odessa’ in Brook­lyn New York … read more

José Anto­nio Gutier­rez was one of the 300,000 sol­diers the U.S. mil­i­tary sent to war in Iraq in March 2003. A few hours after the war began, his pic­ture was … read more