Martin Hampel

After a Palestinian teen gets swept up into a West Bank protest, his mother recounts the family story of hope, courage and relentless struggle that led to this fateful moment.

Numbi, a little village hidden deep in the Democratic Republic of Congo mountains, lies nonetheless at the heart of our world. Here, with their bare hands, miners dig the coltan which will find its way – legally or otherwise – to our industrialized world. For decades this grey gold, indispensable to the manufacture of almost all contemporary technological devices, has been the cause of conflicts and a bitter exploitation. In Numbi, bodies are covered in mud, hands red with blood, and coltan hides in every pocket. Every inhabitant lives with the illusory hope of escaping fate and enjoying for themselves the riches of the Congo. Sensitive, shocking and deeply moving, Of Mud and Blood documents the everyday existence of the inhabitant of Numbi, revealing the hardships and trials of a story from which we must not look away.

Between light and darkness stands Olfa, a Tunisian woman and the mother of four daughters. One day, her two older daughters disappear. To fill in their absence, the filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania invites professional actresses and invents a unique cinema experience that will lift the veil on Olfa and her daughters' life stories. An intimate journey of hope, rebellion, violence, transmission and sisterhood that will question the very foundations of our societies.

In 2000, as the Hezbollah organization takes over Lebanon, Yossi, a Lebanese soldier, helps his friend Fouad to flee the country in order to avoid punishment, as he’s been working against them for 16 years. Fouad takes refuge in Israel with his daughter, Tanya. A few years later, a new war breaks out in Lebanon, causing tensions at the Israeli border. Yossi’s wife, Myriam, decides to go there and asks for Tanya’s help to look for their soldier son, who hasn’t given sign of life since then. This journey will allow the two women to share their sorrows and heal together.

Waleed (40) lives in Haifa with his wife and children and dreams of a writing career while suffering from chronic depression. He develops a close relationship with his neighbor (a small-time crook) with an ulterior plot in mind. While the scheme turns into an unexpected friendship between the two men, it leads them into a journey of dark encounters.

Guled and Nasra are a loving couple, living in the outskirts of Djibouti city with their teenage son, Mahad. However, they are facing difficult times: Nasra urgently needs an expensive surgery to treat a chronic kidney disease. Guled is already working hard as a gravedigger to make ends meet.

Rojda, a native of Iraqi Kurdistan and a soldier in the German army, travels to a refugee camp in Greece where she manages to meet her mother, who has bad news about her sister Dilan.

To be able to travel to Europe and find the love of his life, Sam Ali, a Syrian refugee, accepts to have his back tattooed by one of the most sulfurous contemporary artist; becoming that way a precious work of art.

Filmmaker Elia Suleiman travels to different cities and finds unexpected parallels to his homeland of Palestine.

Caught between the mob and border patrol, washed-up musician Yiannis must put his plans to leave Cyprus on hold when his beloved dog escapes across the wall to the island's Turkish side.

A young Kyrgyz immigrant tries to eke out a living in Moscow after abandoning her newborn and fleeing the hospital.

The border fence between Mexico and the United States is part of their lives; Mexican youths use it as a volleyball net on the beach, holding their own kind of international matches with their opposite numbers on the other side. When Nero scales the metres-high metal bars we suspect that he has done this often before: because nothing is going to divert him from his dream of becoming a US citizen. He follows the traces of his older brother which lead him to Los Angeles and the mansions of the rich and famous where he gazes incredulously at this very different lifestyle with its pools and double garages that he soon hopes will be his. His only chance of quickly acquiring a green card, however, is by volunteering for military service. Before he knows it, Nero finds himself in the desert landscape of the war zones of the Middle East, fighting for his citizenship with a machine gun in his hand.