WORLD PREMIERE Native New Yorker Steve Talt was formerly bodyguard to Farah Pahlavi, the wife of the Shah of Iran, but he remains her loyal servant to this day. Steve is on a mission to find Pahlavi’s stolen art collection, and enlists the help of retired mobsters and his 90-year-old neighbor to pursue the cold […]
NYC PREMIEREAward-winning filmmaker Yung Chang (Up the Yangtze) profiles the legendary Middle East journalist Robert Fisk, known for his books Pity the Nation and The Great War for Civilization. Now in his 70s, Fisk remains vital and intrepid. The film follows him on contemporary reporting missions from Syria to Bosnia, while also looking back on […]
WORLD PREMIERE Ofra Bloch, a New York-based psychoanalyst specializing in trauma, was born in Jerusalem to a Jewish family that emigrated to Palestine in the 1920s. Disturbed by the resurgence of fascism and anti-Semitism around the world, Ofra travels to Germany, Israel, and Palestine to confront her own deep-seated feelings about Germans and Palestinians, and […]
NYC PREMIERE Faced with the amorphous threat of ISIS, resourceful Commander Arian gathers her all-women Kurdish battalion to rescue enslaved civilians in northern Syria. During the final battle of a two-year campaign to free the besieged village of Kobane, Arian is shot five times. Weaving together footage of the intrepid commander training recruits, the troops […]
INTERNATIONAL PREMIERE Amit, a father of four living in a small town in Israel, tells his wife, Galit, that he is a woman and wants to transition. Galit pledges her support, ready to overcome surgery, social stigma and bureaucracy to maintain her marriage. But, as Amit transforms, tensions arise while everyone in the family readjusts […]
WORLD PREMIERE Three determined women in the Middle East lead the fight for gender equality and freedom in this empowering portrait of three agents of change. Politician Selay must travel through Afghanistan with armed security to protect her while educating other women about their rights. Yanar pushes for parliamentary reform in Iraq while running shelters for […]
NYC PREMIERE During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, US military forces relied on local translators to provide the communication critical for mission success. Serving side by side with foreign soldiers, these loyal interpreters, invaluable to the Americans, are deemed traitors by Islamic extremists. After US troops withdraw, interpreters confront their fates: wait for promised […]
NYC PREMIERE Under a dank bridge in Kabul, Afghanistan—the country with the world’s highest rate of opium production and addiction—a squalid group of drug addicts is getting high or fiending for their next fix. Former child bride and self-proclaimed badass Laila offers salvation by inviting these lost souls to the detox clinics she runs with […]
WORLD PREMIERE Two-time Academy Award winner Barbara Kopple (Harlan County, USA) chronicles the experiences of five refugee children from war-torn Syria and Iraq whose families have resettled in Canada. In this sweetly observed film, Kopple follows the boys for two weeks at a summer camp in the Canadian wilderness. We watch as some boys thrive […]
NYC PREMIERE In this Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize-winning film, director Talal Derki (Return to Homs) returns to his native Syria and gains remarkably unfettered access to a radical jihadist and his family for two years. General Abu Osama raises his young sons to become Islamist fighters, but what if they just want to […]