Filmmaker Hassan Fazili documents his family’s journey as they’re forced to flee their home in Afghanistan under threat of death. We follow him, his wife Fatima and their daughters Nagris and Zahra over several years and through several countries. They travel with few possessions besides the cell phones used to shoot this remarkable documentary. “The […]
NYC PREMIERE Taimaa and Nour are two pregnant Syrian refugees who find themselves navigating fresh marriages as they each enter motherhood while held in temporary camps. Competing with thousands of other refugees in Greece for resources, Taimaa and Nour find that parenting comes easier than either bureaucratic answers or marital bliss. Both women make desperate […]
US PREMIERE Paris is a beloved tourist destination, but this film shows us a side of the city most of us will never see. Director Hind Meddeb and co-director Thim Naccache train their cameras on the community of refugees sleeping in the streets in the district called Stalingrad in 2016. Most prominent is a refugee […]
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 […]
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 […]