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 “Euro­pean” metrop­o­lis Istan­bul and Ankara in the West and travel to the fur­thest cor­ners of the East, their last stop being Dogubayaz­it, a small town near the Iran­ian border. Arslan’s pre­sen­ta­tion of Turkey’s cities and people in smooth, long shots that are accom­pa­nied by short, unpre­ten­tious phras­es from the off is an invi­ta­tion for the audi­ence to indulge in the images. The film is not ambi­tious direc­tors’ project – it is an invi­ta­tion to share the film­mak­ers’ per­son­al and atten­tive gaze on a coun­try that has remained large­ly strange for him. “At the time when I made the film, the dis­course about Turkey was very heated, and it con­tin­ues to be that way. The Occi­dent, the Orient – these are terms that are dis­con­nect­ed from real­i­ty to me. The film’s idea is simply to cap­ture images that are not at once com­pat­i­ble with a the­o­ret­i­cal dis­course or a mere illus­tra­tion of mat­ters already known. I wanted to open my eyes for simple, tan­gi­ble things, for the every­day life in this country.”
Thomas Arslan 

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