There’s no place like home…because it doesn’t exist. After living in New Zealand as an immigrant for over 20 years, a young filmmaker takes a journey back to Iran after a 17-year absence to find out whether or not she would still be considered an outsider even in what is termed her ‘homeland’. Iran in Transit is about discovering one’s homeland and a sense of belonging. Filmed entirely underground on a DSLR camera with no real budget, the film had its premiere at the Tel Aviv International Student Film Festival in Israel after winning the Alternative Competition. It also recently screened at the first Goethe Institute’s Docnet Chopshots Festival in Indonesia.
Little Terrorist is a film with solid production values and ethnographic details. Jamal, a young Muslim boy in a Pakistani border town crosses into an Indian minefield after the village cricket ball passes through the barbed-wire fence. Hunted by border security, he encounters an Indian Brahmin. From there a classic moral conflict arises–should the man help the boy evade security, or wash his hands of him?
13-year-old Bhumika travels with a family friend, Krishna, from her Himalayan home to her first job in the city. When Krishna suddenly asks her to cross the border with him to India, Bhumika must ask herself what she’s willing to sacrifice for the good of both her family and Krishna’s.
A pregnant Azeri girl approaches the Iranian-Azeri border. With the help of an Iranian doctor and the border guards, the child is born right on the Iranian frontier.
Like thousands of Malian people, Abdu has decided to reach Europe. The film follows his trip from the Niger River to Ceuta, where dreams are confronted with harsh reality, in the distant lights of the West.
This film follows the illegal smuggling of fish on the border of Egypt, exposing the viewer to a real smuggling operation and describing why these people do this kind of work.
West African truck drivers spend days, weeks, and sometimes months dealing with corrupt border officials and illegal checkpoints on harrowing delivery trips that should take just a few hours.
A documentary covering the lives of Libyan refugees in Tunisia, background stories in the UN camps and the devastating development from the beginning of the NATO air raids until the end of Muammar Ghaddafi. The director tries to make some sense out of the mess he finds himself in, trapped between a hopeless humanitarian aid mission, hotel bars, random superstars and about 100 000 suffering people forgotten by the media.
Two Kurdish men with blue (refugee) passports try to deal with the idea of never being able to go back to their homeland.
An immigrant family wants to smuggle the ashes of their deceased grandmother secretly into Germany. They get caught by customs officers. The officers have never seen a case like this, such an absurd-comical situation. They regret having asked about the urn and wish they could just let the family go. But how?
A border guard desperately tries to stop Europe from opening its borders and at the same time jeopardises his secret love.
A customs office building stands on the border between two towns, two countries, two social systems, two worlds- the Romanic and the Slavic, 65 years after the end of the war. On 20th of December with the entry of Slovenia into the Schengen area, Nova Gorica for the first time in its short history finds itself without border fences. The same night, this traumatic space transforms into a meeting place. Inside is placed a camera, a microphone, a computer and a curtain and people from both sides of the border start streaming in, bringing their stories and images, donating their contributions to the common holdings of memory. Donated memories and fragments of family and archive films tell how two different realities can find themselves simultaneously in the same place.
These men, women and families have, for the most part, spent all their savings on a long journey which led them to Europe, with most people paying smugglers to cross borders. They find themselves in severe destitution in Athens, which has just 1,000 reception places available for over 9,000 asylum seekers in 2011 alone. With no hope of leaving Greece legally and safely, with no hope of living in dignity in Greece, with no hope of returning to their respective countries and in a volatile environment of social tension and the rise of xenophobia, they gather together where they can and hope to find a way to leave.
Catherine lives in a small Moldovan village. Intending to help her poor family she replies to an attractive advertisement offering work abroad. Unsuspecting, she collects her plane ticket to Israel and flies to Tel Aviv. This is where her ‘dream job’ turns out to be a lure and Catherine needs to confront the cruelty she encounters abroad.
It is real and it is striking. In some places it stands 18 feet tall and looks like the gates of Mordor. In other places, it is barely 10 feet tall and looks like it was put together with a stapler. It runs from the Colorado River directly into the Pacific. It is big, intense and intimidating. And it is unfinished. Gaping holes are everywhere. Physically it's confusing. Politically it's puzzling. Ideologically it's complicated. But for Dick and Ron, who both live within a few miles of the border, defending this border fence is simply a matter of protecting themselves and preserving their own beliefs. Drug smugglers don't come to the United States to make an honest living. As the recent killing of Border Patrol Agent Robert Rosas shows, the border is more than a moral line in the sand. The fence is real.
When traveling from Central America to the United States through Mexico, immigrants are forced to battle drug cartels, corrupt police officers, and human traffickers, all before they even come close to the US border.
People tend to assume that the immigrants crossing the US--Mexico border are all Mexican. The reality is that a large percentage of them come from Central America, and their journey north is gruelling.
Two Latinos manage to cross the US Border illegally through the desert. They find a place with some food & water, but they also find something else. What they will do? This short film has received 4 Awards at various film festivals.