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 … 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 and Ashdod in Israel, where the Jewish émi­grés are sur­prised to dis­cov­er they are seen as Rus­sians. Through dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters, the film address­es hopes, illu­sions and dreams of free­dom. This jour­ney into time and place is the story of all the dias­po­ras. “All my char­ac­ters are on a search, an exis­ten­tial search for a pos­si­ble some­where else, an ide­al­ized else­where. They go, they come, but their orbits are anchored to an unreal Odessa. At the same time, those who are in Odessa also live in exile and fan­ta­size about an ideal place: Amer­i­ca or Israel. Final­ly, all of them are wan­der­ing per­ma­nent­ly, with­out end. They live with the absence of a place. And this absence becomes an obses­sive figure in the film. The open­ing of the film is done with a system of sym­bol­ic fig­ures, the exact memory of the film. It arrives, having already lived the voyage towards which it is taking us. One begins the film with his mem­o­ries; the remain­der – is it his memory, his imag­i­na­tion or his view? All that merges togeth­er.” Michale Boganim
Michale Bogan­im: geboren 1972 in Haifa/Israel, aufgewach­sen in Paris. Poli­tolo­gie-Studi­um an der Sor­bonne, Studi­um der Sozi­olo­gie, Philoso­phie und Geschichte in Israel. Film­studi­um an der NFTS. Filme: DUST (2002).

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