Thanassis Karathanos

Escaping from a chicken farm, a hen finds refuge in the courtyard of a crumbling restaurant. There, she discovers love, confronts the pecking order, and fights to protect her eggs from a greedy owner. Her droll yet touching quest for motherhood mirrors the messy compromises and silent struggles of human lives.

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.

In 2022, Mantas Kvedaravičius went back to Ukraine, Mariupol, at the heart of the war, to be with the people he had met and filmed in 2015. Following his death, his producers and collaborators have put all their strength into continuing transmitting his work, his vision and his films. Also a PhD in anthropology, Mantas Kvedaravičius wished to testify as a filmmaker as far as possible from the agitation of the media and the politicians. With huge force and sensitivity, Mariupolis 2 depicts life as it continues amidst the bombing and reveals images that convey both tragedy and hope.

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.

This portrayal of the rhythm of life and work in a gigantic textile factory in Gujarat, India, moves through the corridors and bowels of the enormously disorienting structure—taking the viewer on a journey of dehumanizing physical labor and intense hardship.

Imprisoned on an unfair charge of fraud, a mild-mannered Jordanian contractor discovers that prison has its own rhythms, rules, and economies — and he soon begins to carve out a position for himself in this place where fraud isn’t a crime so much as a way of life.

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.

Stelios Dimitrakopoulos has 32 hours left before he loses everything. From the jazz bar he painstakingly keeps running for years, to his own family. The Romanian gangster who lent him money, now demands the debt to be paid. The middle-man and former friend, makes Stelios take care of illegal errands. His wife is seriously thinking of abandoning him, and a night club owner, not thinking about the consequences, finally starts to stand up for himself. Christmas is coming, the clock is ticking, and the tree in Stelios' house must be decorated.

A group of friends at a Jerusalem retirement home build a machine for self-euthanasia in order to help their terminally ill friend. When rumors of the machine begin to spread, more and more people ask for their help, and the friends are faced with an emotional dilemma

Thomas, a father in his fifties, returns by chance to the town where he grew up. He collapses and wakes up forty years earlier in the body of his teenage self. Thrown back into his past, Thomas will not only have to re-live his first love, but also try to understand the reasons for his father’s mysterious departure. Can you change the past by living it again?

In an act of vengeance, a young man randomly kills two police officers. He escapes to the forest, where he is arrested by two other officers. The three men are surrounded by trees, the woods. They are lost in a maze, a desolate landscape, where the boundaries between the hunter and the hunted are difficult to perceive.

Ajami is an area of Tel Aviv in Israel where Arabs, Palestinians, Jews and Christians live together in a tense atmosphere. Omar, an Israeli Arab, struggles to save his family from a gang of extortionists. He also courts a beautiful Christian girl: Hadir. Malek, an illegal Palestinian worker, tries to collect enough money to pay for his mother's operation. Dando, an Israeli cop, does his utmost to find his missing brother who may have been killed by Palestinians.

A Greek shopkeeper discovers something about his family's past when his mother embraces an Albanian worker.

Leonidas, a young, ambitious police officer, is assigned to a remote island in the Aegean Sea. He dreams of solving important crimes, but there are few to be found in the sleepy beach community where he is left to such menial chores. Each day at the town café, Leonidas and the other locals watch the beautiful Angeliki, the small islands most famous daughter, as she hosts a popular talk show on national TV. These daily rituals are shattered when the island experiences what appears to be an actual crime-the island drunk, Zacharias, is found dead at the base of a cliff. Eager to do some sleuthing, Leonidas soon finds clues that tie the victim to Angeliki, who returns to the island and joins the investigation.

A gifted and well-qualified young teacher takes a job teaching natural sciences at a grammar school in the country. Here he makes the acquaintance of a woman and her troubled 17-year old son. The teacher has no romantic interest in the woman but they quickly form a strong friendship, each recognizing the other's uncertainties, hopes and longing for love.

The story of Alex, who, with the help of his charismatic grandfather, embarks on a journey in search of his real self.

A wealthy grandfather throws a party to celebrate his grandson's First Communion. Soon the family gathering takes unexpected turns.

Juliet, a white girl, falls in love with a dark-skinned romeo, a divine trumpet player from the Roma orchestra. But her father Satchmo doesn't accept Romeo. Romeo needs to fight for Juliet at the legendary Festival of the trumpeters in Gucha.

Over the course of a year, in a small town scarred and beaten down by industrialization, Tonda and Monika, friends since childhood, come to experience what life might be like if they could be with one another – which they seemingly can't. Or can they?

Composer Johann Sebastian Bach is introduced to King Frederick II of Prussia in 1747. The aging composer and the young monarch clash and a battle of egos ensues.

Berlin, A Polterabend (i.e. a party on the eve of a marriage) is taking place in a café. An American has persuaded his German friend to marry him, after just one month of knowing each other. But while Anke has decided to create a family for her and her baby, Bruce has reservations. The party's member consist of various immigrants that happened to be there, each with his own problems and Anke's mother who objects to the marriage and is expelled by her own daughter.