Global Film Initiative
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Thirst
After one of his daughters "shamed" him, Abu Shukri brought his family to the edge of nowhere to scratch out a living by burning wood to make charcoal. When he decided that the family would build a pipeline to bring in running water, he set off a chain of events that alters life irrevocably. A...Watch Movie
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From Two Worlds as a Keepsake
1988, in a multi-ethnic town in Soviet Azerbaijan, eight-year old Ashen's divorced Armenian parents are in an emotional tug-of-war over which of them will raise their child. Ashen's custody becomes a complex matter when family tragedy and political danger impact decisions made...Watch Movie
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Street Days
A middle-aged, unemployed heroin-addict, Checkie, loiters on the Tbilisi street outside his son’s school, where he himself was once a promising student. His wife, meanwhile, struggles to pay the tuition and understand her husband’s lack of interest in the family’s survival, even as the bank...Watch Movie
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Ticket to Jerusalem
Writer/director Rashid Masharawi's inspired hybrid of documentary and fiction begins in a refugee camp near Ramallah. Jabir runs a mobile cinema from his old truck throughout the West Bank while his wife works to bring emergency medical care to Palestinians. Both navigate...Watch Movie
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Kabala
Magic spells lend a helping hand in this debut feature about a young man's troubled relationship with his native village in Mali. Because of ancient prejudices, Hamalla was banished. He returns four years later versed in modern technology at a time when the village's future is precarious because...Watch Movie
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Cairo 678
Three Cairene women from different backgrounds join together in uneasy solidarity to combat the sexual harassment that has impacted each of their lives. We begin on an overcrowded bus line, dreaded by Fayza as a daily site of humiliation and anguish. Responding to a self-defense talk by Seba,...Watch Movie
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Pegasus
Zineb is an emotionally exhausted psychiatrist assigned to Rihana, a traumatized and pregnant young woman found in the street muttering unintelligibly about the "Lord of the Horse." A flashback sequence returns us to Rihana's childhood, where her dictatorial father, horseman chief of his tribe,...Watch Movie
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Uniform
Double lives and deceptions provide the core of Diao Yinan's DV blend of urban realism and Gogolian satire, one of the key early works of China's digital underground. A put-upon youth, busy slaving away at his family’s tailor shop and barely interested in his town's epidemic of factory closures,...Watch Movie
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Sleepwalking Land
In the midst of Mozambique's devastating civil war, Muidinga, an orphaned refugee, wanders the countryside in search of his mother. His only companion is an elderly storyteller and the only guide to finding his mother is a dead man's diary. Together, the storyteller and diary...Watch Movie
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Women's Prison
This taboo-breaking film is based on Manijeh Hekmat's long fieldwork among women prisoners in Iran. She depicts the lives of Iran's lost generation in the two decades since the 1979 Islamic Revolution using the claustrophobic life of women behind bars as a metaphor for the entire society. Her...Watch Movie
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Kilomètre zéro
A story of ethnic conflict between Kurds and Iraqis in the context of the war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s. The central story of the film is set at a time when Kurds were conscripted to serve in the Iraqi army, where they were brutally abused, as a despised minority in Saddam Hussein's...Watch Movie
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What's a Human Anyway?
Set in an urban apartment building where neighbors, friends and family are living in close quarters, the film focuses on male protagonists through whom the three phases of stepping into manhood in Turkish society are explored. Ali, suffering from temporary amnesia, is the main...Watch Movie
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My Time Will Come
A pre-dawn murder sets in motion a series of interlocking tragedies that eventually find their way to the city morgue's brooding Dr. Arturo Fernandez. Physically and emotionally isolated from the world around him, Arturo develops an oddly intimate relationship with the...Watch Movie
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Student
A solitary philosophy student steers his directionless life toward the commission of a violent crime, spurred on by postmodern musings and a post-Soviet order characterized by growing inequality, institutional corruption and a ruthless ethic of "eat or be eaten." Inspired by Dostoevsky's "Crime...Watch Movie
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Rachida
The first feature-length film by Yamina Bachir evokes memories of the worst atrocities of the terror in Algeria. The young teacher Rachida is teaching at a school in Algiers when she is stopped in the street by a group of youths who demand she take a bomb and place it in the school. She...Watch Movie
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Songs from the Southern Seas
Two couples, one Russian and one Kazakh, live side-by-side in relative harmony in a beautiful yet semi-desolate region of the Great Steppe. But when the fair–skinned Russians give birth to a boy of decidedly darker skin, fifteen years of suspicion and acrimony arises between...Watch Movie
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Angel on the Right
Hamro, an unrepentant prodigal son straight out of a Russian jail, returns to his hometown to help his mother die with dignity. But his debts are many and long overdue, the townspeople are tough as nails and he gets more than he expected from the quiet village. In this dark...Watch Movie
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Luxury Car
In this emotionally taut narrative, Li Qi Ming travels from his small village to the city of Wuhan, determined to fulfill his wife's last wish of seeing her son. But instead of finding his son, he discovers his daughter working as a karaoke bar escort, forcing him to come to terms with their...Watch Movie
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Wretched Lives
WRETCHED LIVES focuses on Vanessa, a cosmetics consultant who is forced to care for her troubled and mentally-challenged sister after the sudden death of their mother. Her hustler boyfriend, Olivier, seems unreliable and Vanessa soon abandons him for Uno, an ostensibly liberal and caring...Watch Movie
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Fuse
In Bosnia, still experiencing the effects of the breakup of Yugoslavia, everyday activities in the small town of Tesanj are thrown into a tailspin over an impending visit by American president Bill Clinton. Tesanj is a town still in shock from the war with Serbians, a place where a random land...Watch Movie
