A fisherman's son is offered the ultimate privilege to study at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the epicenter of power of Sunni Islam. Shortly after his arrival, the university’s highest ranking religious leader, the Grand Imam, dies and the young student becomes a pawn in a ruthless power struggle between Egypt's religious and political elite.
7-year-old Sasha has always known that she is a girl. Sasha’s family has recently accepted her gender identity, embracing their daughter for who she truly is while working to confront outdated norms and find affirmation in a small community of rural France.
Recounted mostly through animation to protect his identity, Amin looks back over his past as a child refugee from Afghanistan as he grapples with a secret he’s kept hidden for 20 years.
Filmmakers expose the horrifying mass executions of accused communists in Indonesia and those who are celebrated in their country for perpetrating the crime.
A post-apocalyptic story about a rich family living in a salt mine converted into a luxurious home. The earth around them has apparently been destroyed, but their son has never seen the outside world. As a young girl appears at the entrance of the bunker, the balance of the family is threatened.
Cairo, 2011. A police officer investigates the murder of a woman in a luxurious hotel in the days leading up to the Egyptian revolution.
TPB AFK is a documentary about three computer addicts who redefined the world of media distribution with their hobby homepage The Pirate Bay. How did Tiamo, a beer crazy hardware fanatic, Brokep a tree hugging eco activist and Anakata – a paranoid hacker libertarian – get the White House to threaten the Swedish government with trade sanctions? TPB AFK explores what Hollywood’s most hated pirates go through on a personal level.
An optician grapples with the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-1966, during which his older brother was exterminated.
When we die, there are still some practicalities that need to be taken care of before our time among the living is finally over. In Meanwhile on Earth we enter the world around our end station, an industry of death. It is a place where the existential meets the mundane, the sacred meets the profane.
Examining the violent death of the filmmaker’s brother and the judicial system that allowed his killer to go free, this documentary interrogates murderous fear and racialized perception, and re-imagines the wreckage in catastrophe’s wake, challenging us to change.
When Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps in 1944-45, their terrible discoveries were recorded by army and newsreel cameramen, revealing for the first time the full horror of what had happened. Making use of British, Soviet and American footage, the Ministry of Information’s Sidney Bernstein (later founder of Granada Television) aimed to create a documentary that would provide lasting, undeniable evidence of the Nazis’ unspeakable crimes. He commissioned a wealth of British talent, including editor Stewart McAllister, writer and future cabinet minister Richard Crossman – and, as treatment advisor, his friend Alfred Hitchcock. Yet, despite initial support from the British and US Governments, the film was shelved, and only now, 70 years on, has it been restored and completed by Imperial War Museums under its original title "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey".
Vintersaga, is a song-structured homage to the Swedish melancholy. Through 24 stanzas the film observes a mosaic of situations and individuals, each with their own doubts, memories and dreams, shaping a picture of a land tinged by the bitter cold wind.
Alone and far from home, The Kid makes his way through a strange city looking for the means to get through his day. Surrounded by predators he is forced to make compromises merely to survive, his life of exile grows one day longer.
Concerning Violence is based on newly discovered, powerful archival material documenting the most daring moments in the struggle for liberation in the Third World, accompanied by classic text from The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon.
A temporary house for abandoned children near the front line in eastern Ukraine is run by a small group of social workers determined to provide comfort and safety. It may be humble and somewhat run-down, but this house is filled with love and offers up to nine months of refuge to kids whose fate will be determined by the system. During this short time, the caretakers try to nurture within them a sense of stability and normalcy.
Canned Dreams shows the multi-branching network of the modern food industry. The Finnish consumer buys a can in the grocery store, but where from far away do the raw materials and packaging materials for the preserves come from - and through how many hands? The film not only traces the various stages of the production process, but gives a voice to the people who work as part of it.
Albert and David Maysles' classic GREY GARDENS immortalized the estate of Edith and Little Edie Beale, relatives of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, who lived in alarmingly poor conditions. But there is more to the story: it was Lee Radziwill and Peter Beard who first brought the Maysles to the Beales, when the two set out to make a film about Radziwill's childhood. The reels of that first contact were shelved for 45 years. This documentary recovers the lost footage. Anchored in Beard's recollections and artistic vision, we are returned to "that summer" in 1972, a seductive dream world and collage of radically unconventional creative personalities—Warhol, Bacon, Jagger, Capote—practicing the art of living amidst oppressive forces of class expectation and prejudice.
Florida Justice Transitions is home to 120 convicted sex offenders. Like in many other U.S. states, sex offenders are not allowed to live within 1000 feet of places frequented by children. Because of this, many sex offenders live under bridges or in woods – or in the trailer park Florida Justice Transitions – known as Pervert Park. The crimes committed by the residents range from simple misdemeanors to horrendous acts unbearable to contemplate.
Little Wing tells the story of 12-year-old Varpu, who's quickly growing to adulthood, and about her mother, who doesn't want to grow up. Varpu lives with her mother and has never met her father. One night Varpu has enough of her riding buddies and her mother. She steals a car and drives up north in search of her father, of whom she only knows the name. But her father is not exactly what she had expected. Meeting him trigger something in Varpu and mother's life, making them realize their role in each other's lives, and in the world.
Three pupils on the precipice between childhood and adulthood are studying at Østerskov Boarding School, one of the most unique schools in the world; here, classes are conducted through role-playing games, and the pupils are taught to come to terms with the trauma and their fluid selves through masquerades and metamorphosis. For two school years, the film follows the pupils and their highly emotional adventure through puberty, self-discovery, and maturity, illuminating with a sharp, intimate, humorous as well as poignant gaze, the chaos, the anguish, and the inexpressible joy of the first years of one’s youth.
