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 […]
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE A fearless adventurer, spy and political powerhouse, Gertrude Bell was a true original and the most powerful woman in the British Empire in her day. Letters from Baghdad tells the story of this complex woman who helped shape the modern Middle East after World War I in ways that still reverberate today. […]
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE Directed by Academy Award® winner Thomas Lennon and shot around the globe by 40 teams of filmmakers, Sacred immerses the viewer in an exploration of spirituality across cultures and religions. From a Buddhist monk’s 1,000-day circumnavigation of a mountain in Japan and Hasidic Jews’ ecstatic celebrations in Uman to Angola Prison inmates […]
NYC PREMIERE Padraig O’Malley is legendary among the international human rights community for being a negotiator in crisis zones from Northern Ireland to Kosovo to Iraq. He funds his efforts as the co-owner of a bar in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But he also struggles with addictions to alcohol and work. We meet Padraig in the third […]