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.
When Michèle, the CEO of a gaming software company, is attacked in her home by an unknown assailant, she refuses to let it alter her precisely ordered life. She manages crises involving family, all the while becoming engaged in a game of cat and mouse with her stalker.
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.
Summer, 1910. Inspectors Machin and Malfoy investigate the mysterious disappearances of several tourists on the beautiful beaches of Slack Bay, where a strange community of fishermen lives.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
The city of Mariupolis is by the Azov sea. It is also on the river Kalmius. Most of the city’s residents, half a million according to the last census, are working for the steel factory and do fishing, for leisure or food, in between shifts. The orthodox church towers above the city and its newly build bronze domes are sitting next to it, waiting to be donned. A tent near by is sheltering a crying icon, which receives a steady flow of visitors.
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.
Joseph is in his mid-sixties and has just lost his beloved wife. Everything in his big old mansion reminds him painfully of the years they spent together. One day several visitors turn up unexpectedly. They seem to be relatives of his deceased wife. In the beginning, the uninvited guests treat Joseph with loving care, but bit by bit the situation begins to change. The visitors slowly, almost unnoticably, become aggressive, even hostile, invaders. They try to get rid of Joseph and take over his house, his world, his thoughts. Is this just the paranoia of an old man or really a ruthless invasion?
The film follows three generations of a Palestinian family, tracking cycles of trauma beginning with the 1948 displacement from Jaffa and continuing through occupation, violence and present day heartbreak in the West Bank.
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.
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.
In Budapest in 1957, one year after the failure of the Hungarian Revolution, a young Jewish boy whose mother has raised him to believe that his father will return from the camps has his hopes shattered when a brutish stranger appears on the doorstep to take his family back.
Merowe Dam in North Sudan. Maher works in a traditional brickyard fed by the waters of the Nile. Every evening, he secretly wanders off into the desert to erect a mysterious construction made of mud. Despite a disturbing wound in his lower back that seems to be eating away at his skin, he continues his labor day after day. While the Sudanese people rise to claim their freedom, his mud creation starts slowly to take a life of its own.
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.
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.
The death of a pet prompts the unraveling of a woman.
