Samia Yusuf Omar is just 9 years old when she discovers her special talent: she is faster than all the other boys and girls. With her friend Ali, who is the same age, she has the goal to earn real money with running and become famous. The children make a pact: Ali becomes Samia's coach. With his help, Samia is to become a real champion. But the ongoing civil war makes life in Mogadishu increasingly difficult...
The story of Tiny Tim’s improbable rise to stardom is the ultimate fairytale - and so is that of his downfall. For a brief time, the shy and truly unusual outsider artist was the biggest star in the world.
Inspired by real life events, Madame Luna tells the story of an Eritrean refugee who is washed ashore in Libya and survives to become one of the most notorious human smugglers, with deep ties to the Italian Mafia. Now trapped in Italy and forced to experience the brutalising reality endured by the people she has exploited in the past, Madame Luna must try to find a way out before she is recognized and brought to justice. In the process she forms a powerful bond with a younger version of herself.
Jan, a nurse who is also a father, was sexually abused by his father as a teenager. Working in Nuuk, Greenland, he tries to connect to the culture with sex. When someone calls him a Kalak, a Greenlandic word with a double meaning of both a "true" and "dirty" Greenlander, he wears the epithet as a badge of honor. Ultimately, he has to confront his father.
World War II is around the corner, but the only thing Sally Bauer can think of is the ocean. Her dream is to swim across the English Channel.
When a Swedish teen rapper finds a rabid fanbase via the internet, international superstar Yung Lean is born. But as his fame grows, darkness settles in, blurring the line between reality and his own vivid imagination.
Is there anymore mutual understanding than a bag of sunflower seeds between two girlfriends?
A man lives in the forest, in the midst of a pack of dogs. He feeds them, cleans them and takes care of them as if they were his own. When, one day, one of them disappears, the man has no choice but to go out and look for it.
Madre tells the story of 16-year old Andrea who leaves a poor neighbourhood in Colombian Medellin to take part in the casting for a porno movie.
In icy mid-winter Toronto, a group of pregnant women desperately strive to regain control of their lives. They have insurmountable forces against them: homelessness, drug addiction, violent relationships. But following these particular individuals are the attentive eyes of their guardian angels, the social workers of a unique public health initiative. If these expectant mothers can only manage to break free of the vicious cycles dogging their steps, they have a chance to keep their newborns.
A group of young women from Ouagadougou study at a girl school to become auto mechanics. The classmates become their port of safety, joy and sisterhood, all while they are going through the life changing transition into becoming adults in a country boiling with political changes. In a country with youth unemployment at 52 percent, jobs are a hot issue. The young girls at a mechanics school in Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou are right in the middle of a crucial point in life when their dreams, hopes and courage are confronted with opinions, fears and society’s expectations of what a woman should be. Using interesting narrative solutions, Theresa Traore Dahlberg depicts their last school years and at the same time succeeds in showing the country’s violent past and present. This is a feature-film debut and coming-of-age film with much warmth, laughs, heartbreak and depth.
A tragicomic documentary that portrays the very last acts of a long marriage. A film about the tentative search for a beginning of what - finally, and unfortunately - is over.
Sofia, a young director fresh out of film school, reunites with her father who has spent most of his life in prison. He lives a life marked by addiction and criminality, and Sofia's biggest hope is that she can help him on his feet and repair broken bonds.
Zanyar Adami looks down at Bagdad from an airplane heading to Sweden. His mother is still down there at the airport. His father isn’t even there to wave goodbye. At the time, Zanyar is only five years old. 23 years later Zanyar, soon to be a father, sits in his kitchen in a suburb of Stockholm. His father, Taher, sits in front of him. Any day now, Zanyar will become a father himself and he knows that he can’t wait anymore. He has to confront his father with the question he has been afraid to ask all his life: How could Taher leave him in the midst of a war and then send him to Sweden all by himself?
This film is an homage to the Gaza Strip and to the possibility of hope beyond hopelessness. Ouroboros, the symbol of the snake eating its tail, is both end and beginning: death as regeneration. A 74-minute experimental narrative film that turns the destruction of Gaza into a story of heartbreak, Ouroboros asks what it means to be human when humanity has failed. Taking the form of a love story, the film's central character is Diego Marcon, a man who embarks on a circular journey to shed his pain only to experience it, again and again. In the course of a single day, his travel fuses together Native American territories, the ancient Italian city of Matera, a castle in Brittany, and the ruins of the Gaza Strip into a single landscape.
Colombia, 1990’s. A single mother attempts to keep her family together after her son is drafted by the army and assigned to the front in the country’s most dangerous war zone. To do this, she embarks on a journey against time in a society ruled by men, corruption and violence.
Filled with vitality, humor and unexpected situations, Hamada paints an unusual portrait of a group of young friends living in a refugee camp in the middle of nowhere. Western Sahara is known as “the last colony in Africa” and this conflict is the longest and one of the least known ongoing disputes in the continent, but the Sahrawi people refuse to become invisible.
In Bellum, modern warfare and the development of AI are connecting three seemingly disparate locations and lives; a scientist in Sweden, a private military contractor in the Nevada desert in the USA and a world renowned war photographer in Afghanistan. Through their actions and decisions, the film delves into the jargons and logics that pushes warfare forward. It’s often said that war is inhumane. But in this film, this assumption is turned upside down. Because in fact it seems there is nothing more human than war. Humanity has always been at war, often over abstract ideas such as nationality, borders, religion, money or freedom and this is something that in fact distinguishes us from all other animals on this planet. Perhaps the Greco-Roman world was right that war was a demon; Bellum. And, that the war actually feeds itself: “Bellum se ipsum alet”.
Ghost Rockets centers on human desire to explore and explain the unknown. The film weaves together an ambitious UFO investigation with a personal story that gives a rare insight into the hearts and minds of a UFO-investigator. Every year, the organization UFO‐Sweden receives numerous reports about inexplicable occurrences ‐ usually dismissed as having to do with the moon, airplanes, satellites or mental instability on the part of the witness. Sometimes, though, they get a report that they are unable to explain, one of them being the story of the ghost rocket.
The change in Giorgi’s life could not be more radical. The city, art, his regular, middle-class existence and his marriage to Ana are all behind him. Now he is alone. Giorgi goes into isolation on a small barren island in a simple hut by the sea. In an inhospitable environment, surrounded only by a handful of strangers, between chicken farming and duck hunting, he is trying to pick up the pieces of his life. But his wounds are deep, and the shadows of his happy past repeatedly catch up with him.
