Tag : Film

'Charcoal Traffic' is the first film shot in Somalia for nearly two decades. The dramatic short film conveys the destructive effects of the charcoal trade. Nomadic pastoralists in southern Somalia are being murdered for confronting charcoal gangs who destroy their trees and pasture lands. Through...

'Svetlana's Journey' was produced and directed by Michael on location in Bulgaria. He uses film to educate society about the growing epidemic of human trafficking, specifically sex trafficking of minors. In 2003, working on an action film in Bulgaria, Michael became aware of young children being...

Decades of poverty, environmental degradation, violence, instability and dictatorship have left Haiti the poorest nation in the Americas. The main character of 'Miss Body Plastik', is Dezilia, a twenty-something young woman who has little support from family and friends. This lack of support does...

The 1994 Rwandan Genocide is notorious: in the course of 100 days, up to one million were slaughtered. Gilbert Ndahyao shot 'Behind this Convent' in the back yard of the home of his parents, located behind a convent in a small town outside of Kigali. During this time, nuns exhumed the bodies of...

This documentary tracks the arrival of Pop Idol into Afghanistan after 30 years of war and Taliban rule. Under the Taliban music was outlawed. But today, millions gather weekly to watch the TV series, Afghan Star, and vote for their favourite singers, some of them female, on their mobile phone. For...

Fadi's film focuses on the attempts of one couple to enjoy quality time together in the Palestinian refugee camp Bourj al Barajneh, outside Beirut, Lebanon. The constant noise and overcrowding play a central role in the film, which portrays the battle to create any kind of quality of life when...

'A Space Exodus' is a brief, stylish remake of a few key scenes from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey', with the artist cast as the first Palestinian cosmonaut. The film takes a narrative of extreme, technological progress and transposes it onto a situation in which a population is bound,...

For many years, Mohsen Makhmalbaf has made controversial films both within and outside Iran protesting against social oppression. He was forced to leave Iran in 2004 due to the extreme pressure of censorship and has since been the spokesperson for the Green Movement, a peaceful social movement...

In 2008, filmmaker and journalist Maziar Bahari was seized by Iranian authorities after he published an article in Newsweek dissecting the Green Revolution movement. He was one of a thousand people seized during the post-election crackdown. The Harvard Film Archive said his work revealed the human...

Research commissioned for ‘The Lost Girls of South Africa’ found that a young girl born in South Africa is more likely to be raped than she is to complete secondary education. Deborah and Xoliswa were determined to tell the story of some of these victims of sexual abuse in a way that truly...

Through intimate interviews, provocative art and rare historical film and video, Lynn’s film reveals how art can address the political consequences of discrimination and violence. She has been working on this project for 42 years, amassing 13,000 minutes of footage, documenting courageous and...

Every year millions of young girls are forced into marriage, and although child marriage is outlawed in many countries, the tradition continues. Stephanie’s film is a call to action in the words of the child brides themselves.

'The Invisibles', a series of four short films by Marc Silver and Gael García Bernal, details the plight of tens of thousands of men, women and children who leave their homes in Central and South America each year to travel across Mexico in search of a better life in the USA. They explore the...

Thet Sambath spent 10 years gaining the trust of former Khmer Rouge perpetrators and persuaded them to confess their crimes on film in order to understand this most mysterious of genocidal events – both for himself as a victim of the Killing Fields, his fellow Cambodians and the word as a whole....

Dhondup Wangchen understood the power of documentary film making to convey a message of hope. Without any formal training and purely motivated by the desire to document the need for social change, he travelled across Tibet with only one assistant, using a hand held camera to make the first...