Students in The Documentary Project at Columbia Journalism School learn to write, film and narrate the stories of our time, from deadline reporting to profile writing and documentary features. Successful candidates have leveraged their work to include magazine features, NPR radio stories and newspaper articles. Columbia’s showcase includes: Born to Stay (USA, 24 min., Daniela […]
After Raqqa, Syria, was overtaken by ISIS in 2014, a group of anonymous citizen journalists formed a collective to report the truth of the Syrian conflict to the outside world. With remarkable access, director Matthew Heineman (Cartel Land) presents an intimate and immersive profile of the brave figures involved, revealing what they’ve sacrificed through their […]
INTERNATIONAL PREMIERE After the death of their emotionally distant mother, Elisheva Rise, her seven children discover a secret cache of journals that she kept for over half a century. Unusually, these were written not in her own voice, but from the perspectives of each of her children, beginning with their birth. Now, filmed by Elish’s […]
US PREMIERE In Palestine’s West Bank, Kholoud Al-Faqih is the first woman judge appointed to any of the Middle East’s Shari’a courts. In this courtroom drama, we witness how she applies the law, sometimes with a different emphasis than her male colleagues. We also see the resistance she faces, along with her male counterpart, a […]
In the surprise box-office smash Kedi, director Ceyda Torun returns to her native Istanbul to capture her hometown from seven distinct feline perspectives, including mama cat Bengü, “jealous housewife” Psikopat, foodie Duman and hustler Sari. Following this coterie — a small sampling of the city’s hundreds of thousands of strays — through the streets as […]
WORLD PREMIERE Award-winning filmmaker Julia Bacha (Budrus) chronicles the remarkable journey of Naila Ayesh, who played a key role in the nonviolent Palestinian uprising known as the First Intifada. When the uprising broke out in the late 1980s, Naila was living in Gaza. Faced with a choice between love, family and freedom, she embraced all […]
Part of our Bring a Friend special – get 2 tickets for the price of 1! NYC PREMIERE Over the course of three years, journalist Adil Khan Farooq follows the charismatic Ubaydullah Hussain, an outspoken Norwegian Muslim missionary, as he recruits young converts to Islam. Hussain is revealed as an extremist, supporting acts of terror and […]
WORLD PREMIERE A compelling, ground-level immersion into the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time, Sky & Ground accompanies the Nabi clan, a large, extended Syrian-Kurdish family, as they painstakingly make their way from their home in Aleppo, bombed out by the war, to the Idomeni refugee camp on the border of Greece and Macedonia. Their […]
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE Assembling a diverse group of Middle Eastern women with a shared love of food, Mariam Shaar successfully launches Soufra, her own catering company. What makes her enterprise unique is that Mariam has lived her entire life in Burl El Barajneh, a refugee camp near Beirut, home to everyone on her team. The […]
WORLD PREMIERE So an Egyptian lawyer, a couch-surfing custodian and an Orthodox Jew walk into a comedy club… and end up in a documentary. Standing Up follows these three unlikely aspiring stand-up comics, willing to risk everything in pursuit of their dreams of making it in comedy. Director Jonathan Miller tells their story with warmth […]