Filmed over nearly five years in twenty-five countries on five continents, and shot on seventy-millimetre film, Samsara transports us to the varied worlds of sacred grounds, disaster zones, industrial complexes, and natural wonders.
As a mother and daughter struggle to cope with the terrors of the post-revolution, war-torn Tehran of the 1980s, a mysterious evil begins to haunt their home.
This film is based on the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire 1915, which resulted in the forced migration and diaspora of the Armenian minority. One day a young family man, Nazaret Manoogian, gets deported by the Turkish authorities together with all the other Armenian men from his native village of Mardin. He becomes a forced laborer and only survives the mass murder by chance and an act of kindness, but loses his family, speech and faith. One night the devastated Nazaret learns that his daughters may still be alive and didn't die like his wife from starvation, violence or rape on death marches. Nazaret goes on a quest to find them and travels from his small village through the Mesopotamian deserts to the sea, always looking for clues that might lead him to his children. Nazaret's epic journey will take him from Asia to America, from the end to a new beginning... Written by Anonymous
WADJDA is a 10-year-old girl living in a suburb of Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. Although she lives in a conservative world, Wadjda is fun loving, entrepreneurial and always pushing the boundaries of what she can get away with. After a fight with her friend Abdullah, a neighborhood boy she shouldn't be playing with, Wadjda sees a beautiful green bicycle for sale. She wants the bicycle desperately so that she can beat Abdullah in a race. But Wadjda's mother won't allow it, fearing repercussions from a society that sees bicycles as dangerous to a girl's virtue. So Wadjda decides to try and raise the money herself. At first, Wadjda's mother is too preoccupied with convincing her husband not to take a second wife to realize what's going on. And soon enough Wadjda's plans are thwarted when she is caught running various schemes at school. Just as she is losing hope of raising enough money, she hears of a cash prize for a Koran recitation competition at her school. She devotes herself... Written by Razor Film Produktion GmbH
Two friends that call each other Gerry decide to hide in the wilderness in order to see something. However, they do not find what they're looking for. They decide to return to the car but they get lost in the desert, without water, supplies or a compass. Now they have to walk, trying to find the road to survive. Written by Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
In the Ottoman province of Hijaz during World War I, a young Bedouin boy experiences a greatly hastened coming-of-age as he embarks on a perilous desert journey to guide a British officer to his secret destination.
Barbecue is about more than grilling a piece of meat. It’s a ritual performed religiously across the world. For some it’s a path to salvation. It is the pride of nations. And the stories told around the fires become a way to bring the world together.
Documentary - War zone borders, engine trouble and the difficulties of making money to survive couldn't outweigh the thrill of adventure and discovery Daniel Rintz encountered while motorcycling around the world for two and a half years.
High off the success of her first book and planning to marry ZIAD, her sensible, stable and studious fiance, MAY BRENNAN has it all. At least that's what she'd like people to believe. Reunited with her family in Amman, she's thrust back into the chaos of her former existence. Her headstrong mother NADINE, a born-again Christian disapproves of her Muslim fiance so thoroughly she plans to boycott the wedding. Her younger sisters DALIA and YASMINE behave like her children. And her estranged father EDWARD is suddenly and suspiciously interested in making amends. As her wedding day looms, May finds herself more and more confronted by the trauma of her parents divorce. And soon, her once carefully structured life spins hopelessly out of control. Written by Anonymous
'The Hurt Locker' meets 'An Inconvenient Truth', THE AGE OF CONSEQUENCES investigates the impacts of irreversible climate change, resource scarcity, mass migration, and pandemic conflict through the lens of US national security and global instability.
Mina, a young college student, has her life ripped away after her family is killed. When she finds out their murder was part of a botched kidnapping to return her to her real father—a terrorist in the middle east.
Trapped in a prison cell ("Zinzana") in a remote police station, a man named Talal (Saleh Bakri) is tortured by visions of his beloved ex-wife and son as he waits to hear his fate. When officer Daban (Ali Suliman) from a neighboring town stops by, Talal watches as the friendly visit suddenly turns into a bloodbath. Being behind bars is now the least of Talal's problems, as he is forced to play a madman's game to save his family's lives. Written by Image Nation Abu Dhabi
Desperate for companionship, a lonely, young Palestinian-American man agrees to marry an Israeli woman in need of a Green Card, forcing them to re-examine their respective cultural and familial traditions.
Jordan, 1967: displaced to a refugee camp after the occupation of their West Bank village, an eleven-year old boy and his mother enact the emancipating dream that every refugee has imagined countless times, in Annemarie Jacir's passionate and moving follow-up to her prize-winning debut Salt of This Sea.
Mustafa and his wife Salwa come from two Palestinian villages that are only 200 meters apart, but separated by the wall. Their unusual living situation is starting to affect their otherwise happy marriage, but the couple does what they can to make it work. Every night, Mustafa flashes a light from his balcony to wish his children on the other side a goodnight, and they signal him back. One day Mustafa gets a call that every parent dreads: his son has been in an accident. He rushes to the checkpoint where he must agonisingly wait in line only to find out there is a problem with his fingerprints and is denied entry. Desperate, Mustafa resorts to hiring a smuggler to bring him across. His once 200-meter journey becomes a 200-kilometer odyssey joined by other travellers determined to cross.