Passage of Life

Rory is an ambitious entrepreneur who brings his American wife and kids to his native country, England, to explore new business opportunities. After abandoning the sanctuary of their safe American suburban surroundings, the family is plunged into the despair of an archaic '80s Britain and their unaffordable new life in an English manor house threatens to destroy the family.

A young refugee of the Sudanese Civil War who wins a lottery for relocation to the United States with three other lost boys. Encountering the modern world for the first time, they develop an unlikely friendship with a brash American woman assigned to help them, but the young man struggles to adjust to this new life and his feelings of guilt about the brother he left behind.

Based on the true story of a black girl who was born to two white Afrikaner parents in South Africa during the apartheid era.

Facing eviction in a city her family can no longer afford, a woman plunges into a desperate and increasingly dangerous all-night search to raise $25,000.

Behrani, an Iranian immigrant buys a California bungalow, thinking he can fix it up, sell it again, and make enough money to send his son to college. However, the house is the legal property of former drug addict Kathy. After losing the house in an unfair legal dispute with the county, she is left with nowhere to go. Wanting her house back, she hires a lawyer and befriends a police officer. Neither Kathy nor Behrani have broken the law, so they find themselves involved in a difficult moral dilemma.

When lapsed Jew and former cardiologist Harry suddenly decides to spend his retirement as a pig farmer in Nazareth, Israel, the move deeply shocks his family and his new neighbours. Back in New York, Harry’s ex-wife Monica is trying to manage the lives of their adult children, Annabelle and David, as well as her own.

On the French island of Mont Saint-Michel, Jack, a failed presidential candidate, Tom, a poet and Sonia, a physicist, engage in an intellectual conversation about politics, philosophy and life over the course of a single day.

A 21-year-old girl is released from prison, only to deal with the neighborhood gossip about her and family conflicts. She decides to save one million yen, move to where no one knows her and keep repeating the process.

In New York City, six-year-old Maisie is caught in the middle of a bitter custody battle between her self-absorbed parents—an aging rock singer mother and a distracted art dealer father. As both quickly marry new partners to strengthen their legal standing, Maisie is shuttled back and forth in an endless game of emotional point-scoring. Yet amid the chaos and upheaval, Maisie begins to find true comfort and affection in her new step-parents.

Young Cedric Errol and his widowed mother live in genteel poverty in 1880s Brooklyn after the death of his father. Cedric's grandfather, the Earl of Dorincourt, has long ago disowned his son for marrying an American. But after the death of the Earl's remaining son, he decides to accept Cedric as his heir.

Mahree Bok lives on a farm in South Africa. Her father is a policeman who cannot hide his joy when activist Steve Biko is caught by the South African authorities. Piper Dellums is the daughter of a US congressman from California and who lives in a nice home in Washington DC. When Mahree is chosen to spend a semester at the Dellums' house, she doesn't expect that her host family would be black. Nor do her hosts suspect that she is not a black South African.

In the outskirts of Tokyo, a poor but close-knit group living on the fringes of society survives through shoplifting and odd jobs. When Osamu and his son take in a neglected young girl, their already fragile existence begins to unravel. As the family grows attached to her, buried secrets surface, forcing them to confront the true meaning of love, belonging, and what makes a family.

Kurt Longson tries to avenge his daughters death. To succeed he has to battle with his conscience and morality to realize true love.

Based on the writer/director's childhood, FARMING tells the story of a young Nigerian boy, 'farmed out' by his parents to a white British family in the hope of a better future. Instead, he becomes the feared leader of a white skinhead gang.

A drama set in the American South, where a precocious, troubled girl finds a safe haven in the music and movement of Elvis Presley.

In order to be reinstated to the bar and recover custody of her daughter, a hotshot lawyer, now in recovery and on probation, must take on the appeal of a woman wrongfully convicted of murder.

Idealistic young attorney Adam Hall takes on the death row clemency case of his racist grandfather, Sam Cayhall, a former Ku Klux Klan member he has never met.

In a suburban landscape, the lives of several families interlace with loss, despair and personal crisis. Esther Gold has lost focus on all but caring for her comatose son, Paul, and neglects her daughter and husband. Lawyer Jim Train is devoted to his career, not his family. Helen Christianson wants to find a new spark in life, while Annette Jennings tries to rebuild hers.

Katy McLaughlin desires to work on her family's mountainside horse ranch, although her father insists she finish boarding school. Katy finds a mustang in the hills near her ranch. The headstrong 16 year old then sets her mind to tame a mustang and prove to her father she can run the ranch. But when tragedy happens, it will take all the love and strength the family can muster to restore hope.

After her stay-at-home husband leaves her, a workaholic lawyer finds that she is not completely up to the tasks of caring for her young son, ailing father and household all by herself.

Turtles Can Fly tells the story of a group of young children near the Turkey-Iraq border. They clean up mines and wait for the Saddam regime to fall.

Jalil is 17-year-old boy living with his Iranian family in a suburb near Helsinki. Though he has lived in Finland all his life, it seems hard for him to find acceptance among the "native" Finns. At home he faces the opposite problem. His parents demand him to respect Iranian cultural traditions. Jalil is about one day in the life of a boy standing on the edge of two cultures. On this summer day big things are bound to culminate; religion, identity, love.

Navy SEAL Lieutenant A.K. Waters and his elite squadron of tactical specialists are forced to choose between their duty and their humanity, between following orders by ignoring the conflict that surrounds them, or finding the courage to follow their conscience and protect a group of innocent refugees. When the democratic government of Nigeria collapses and the country is taken over by a ruthless military dictator, Waters, a fiercely loyal and hardened veteran is dispatched on a routine mission to retrieve a Doctors Without Borders physician.

After an Afghanistan-born woman who lives in Canada receives a letter from her suicidal sister, she takes a perilous journey through Afghanistan to try to find her.

In 2032 an eight-year old boy, displaced by global warming, fends for himself as an environmental refugee in a hostile northern metropolis. Haunted by memories of flooding that left him homeless and orphaned, the boy forms an unexpected friendship with an Inuk ice carver who helps him confront his past.

The lives of two asylum seekers fleeing post-social unrest in their home city intertwine in Britain, starting a romance that tests their resilience and adversity.

Jakop, a lone fisherman on the coast of lake Peipus has to decide whether refugees brought to his door are his way of redeeming past sins or merely a means to quickly earn much needed cash.

A selfless young woman, the daughter of a middle-class refugee family from East Pakistan, sacrifices her own happiness for her unappreciative family.

Centers on a group of weary Middle Eastern refugees who have made their way to Turkey to apply for European visas.

As his restaurant crumbles and his wife battles cancer, an Italian American owner's fate collides with a driven Middle Eastern immigrant chasing the American Dream and his legacy.

A Czech refugee uses women to advance his business interest.

The act of a woman with a broken nose, who suddenly jumps out of a taxi and throws herself off the bridge in Belgrade, connects the lives of three witnesses.

Azad comes to Sweden by mistake. In order to blend in with the family that hides him, he must pretend that he is nine years old. Suddenly he's quite alone in a new country and doesn't understand the language. But with the help of a spaced-out hot-dog vendor, the coolest guy in school, and world champion Kajsa Bergqvist, maybe he can find his real family again.

This is a true story about forty Jewish children on their way to Palestine, who were blocked by the German and Italian occupation of Yugoslavia in 1941. Before finding a haven at Villa Emma in Nonantola in northern Italy, where they arrived on June 17, 1942, the children spent several adventurous months in Slovenia, caught up in the ongoing fight between the partisans and the Italian army. In April 1943, another 33 children, some from the Balkans, others from France, joined the original group. All were orphans who had lost their parents in concentration camps and had subsequently been smuggled out of Germany by Recha Freier, a well-known Zionist. The group ranged in age from six to twenty one and settled in at Villa Emma with their chaperones and teachers, Josef Indig, Marco Schoky and the pianist Boris Jochverdson.

A Chinese medical student named Gan Shosho finds himself cut off from his homeland as he is studying in Japan during the outbreak of the war. Despite his difficult circumstances, he finds love in the form of Sachiko and the two marry. They later travel to Nanjing to live a new life together where Sachiko and Shaochang cooperate with the Japanese-backed government. Their ultimate hope is to secure peace but their idealism is not enough to keep them together through brutal times and with the end of the war the two find themselves facing a divorce... --Osaka Asian Film Festival

Parvaneh is a young Afghan immigrant who recently arrived at a transit centre for asylum seekers in the Swiss Alps. The only things she has got to know yet are the rural area surrounding the centre and the centre itself.

In the center of Hamburg, the discovery of an unexploded bomb from the Second World War not only leads to a far-reaching evacuation, but also to an interpersonal state of emergency.

In the fall of 1948, shortly before the end of the civil war in Greece, six young leftists traveled to Athens, boarded a plane to Thessaloniki, and forced the pilot to fly them to neighboring Yugoslavia, where they would seek political asylum along with other comrades. Their plan went off without a hitch and went down in history as the first hijacking ever.

Superficial people are revealed and drastically changed by circumstance or luck in this a tale of death, seduction, blackmail and theft among British and Americans in Florence in the turbulent days just before World War II.