Global Film Initiative
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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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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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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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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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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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The Night of Truth
Fanta Régina Nacro portrays the insanity of modern African history as Shakespearean tragedy in her debut feature film, a theatrical parable in which the ghosts of civil wars past haunt a nation's fledgling peace. Recalling recent conflicts in Rwanda, Sierra Leone and the...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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The Photograph
Sita is a spirited young woman working to support her family as a singer and prostitute in a local brothel. Always short of funds and bullied by her pimp, she convinces an elderly portrait photographer, Mr. Johan, to rent her a room. In failing health, Mr. Johan is desperate to find an apprentice...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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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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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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Nada+
Juan Carlos Cremata Malberti's NADA+ is a remarkable debut feature that explores the repressive, crippling political and social aspects of today's Cuba while turning upside-down all of our comfortably clichéd expectations about the United State's island neighbor. Carla is a young postal worker...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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Shadow Kill
A hangman in a southern Indian village who has spent his life carrying out politically motivated executions is now old and so wracked with guilt that he takes to heavy drinking and praying to the goddess Kali to forgive his sins. Veteran director Adoor Gopalakrishnan sets the film in 1941, the...Watch Movie
