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 luxury apart­ment com­plex­es they build by day. In 9 STAR HOTEL, the film­mak­er fol­lows Ahmed and Muham­mad, one a merry col­lec­tor of found objects, the other a philo­soph­i­cal crit­i­cas­t­er of the Pales­tin­ian char­ac­ter (“We think back­ward. We never think for­ward.”). Togeth­er, they share food, belong­ing and sto­ries, and live under the con­stant threat of get­ting arrest­ed – police, sol­diers, and the secret ser­vice are all tire­less­ly on the alert for ille­gal work­ers. With raw, hand­held images, this touch­ing film doc­u­ments friend­ship, nos­tal­gia and the uncom­pro­mis­ing urge to survive. 

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 … read more

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