A year after the euphoria on Tahrir Square, the Egyptian demonstrators’ goals have not even come close to being reached. The country is ruled with an iron fist and there is still no democracy. The ‘eye of the world’ has moved elsewhere. How things have been in Egypt since 25 January 2011 is explained using five portrai...
Mazwi, Zama and Mnikelo live in the South African informal settlements around Kennedy Road, one of the many slums that the government plans to clear out and destroy. However, no plans have been made to provide alternative housing. The young South Africans will tolerate this situation no longer and rise up in revolt. Th...
Habibi takes an old Arabian folktale about forbidden love and retells it as a love story between two students in the modern-day Middle East. At university in the West Bank, dreamy Qays and lovely Layla fall head-over-heels for each other’s charms. When their student visas are revoked, they return to the Palestini...
Poignant film about survivors of the genocide in Srebrenica. Adnan, a young accordion player who lives in the Belvedere refugee camp, is fed up with his family’s gloomy existence and auditions for the ‘Big Brother’ television show. Adnan’s mother Ruvedja is one of the many mourning inhabitants ...
Absurd portrait of the notorious ‘naked general’ Joshua Blahyi who evangelised after the bloody civil war in Liberia. Now he asks God and the surviving relatives of his victims for redemption. Butt-naked general Joshua Blahyi is a living legend in the Liberian capital Monrovia. During the fourteen years of ...
For four years, director and human rights defender Mona Nicoara followed a group of Roma children in their attempt to integrate the Rumanian education system, which is divided along ethnic lines. Our School is a moving portrait of poverty, discrimination and segregation, but also of freedom, humour, innocence and the w...
Shocking documentary about the bloody denouement of the Sri Lankan war, which has raged for almost twenty-six years. Using mobile phone footage, filmed by people that were subjected to the atrocities and by those that committed them, director Callum Macrae pieced together a compelling and horrifying film document about...
Two decades after the civil war in El Salvador came to an end, survivors return to their devastated mountain village. A beautifully stylised documentary about the power, courage and high spirits of people that lost everything, and about their capacity to build up a new life while singing and working. In the heart of E...
Journalists in Sri Lanka risk life and limb to practice their profession. Lasantha Wickrematunge was one of these champions. He was gunned down by eight men in broad daylight. Newly wed and freshly widowed, his wife Sonali Samarasinghe had to arrange her bridegroom’s funeral only a few days after the wedding. Besides b...
According to this cinematically compelling shock doc we live under the nuclear sword of Damocles. Using a voice-over by actor Gary Oldman, a host of famous talking heads and powerful songs by Pearl Jam and Radiohead, this film conveys a discomforting message in a rather surprising way. The cold war is over for some tim...