
One inside, one outside. One thin line that creates “us” and “them”. The importance of the borders has again a huge impact in Europe. Yesterday it was all about free movement. Today it´s about controled borders. And walls and fences have become normality. “Before our eyes” is a testimony that shows a situation where Hungary, and indirectly Europe closes itself to the outside world. The film portrays four places, four events, which was filmed over three days in early September 2015, when the worst refugee crisis we have seen since the Second World War started in earnest. “My Europe does not build walls!” said Stefan Löfven, the swedish prime minister, in a speech a few days later. Before our eyes shows how words and actions are no longer connected. Today, Spain, Greece, Bulgaria, the UK, Hungary, Slovenia and Austria have built fences and walls to strengthen theirs and Europe’s external borders.
2017-01-01
0
0.0Following the death of her brother, filmmaker Robie Flores returns to her hometown Eagle Pass on the Texas/Mexico border, wanting to turn back time. She collides with unruly experiences of adolescence – quinceañeras, Rio Grande river excursions, teen makeovers and beyond – that invite her to soak up the details of the home her brother adored and she ignored. What emerges is a playful dance between a personal and collective coming-of-age portrait of kids on the border and Robie herself as she rediscovers the possibilities of joy in the aftermath of grief.
10.0The Israeli filmmaker Shai Corneli Polak records the building of the 'security wall' through Palestinian territory at the village of Bil'in. The villagers protest mostly peacefully, while the Israeli army doesn't react peacefully. By now the Israeli High Court has ruled that the building of the wall was illegal.
0.0A documentary chronicling the adolescent years of Elie Wiesel and the history of his sufferings. Eliezer was fifteen when Fascism brutally altered his life forever. Fifty years later, he returns to Sighetu Marmatiei, the town where he was born, to walk the painful road of remembrance - but is it possible to speak of the unspeakable? Or does Auschwitz lie beyond the capacity of any human language - the place where words and stories run out?
4.9Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors.
6.8An urgent and powerful documentary, shot in a detention centre where asylum seekers trying to reach Australian shores are indefinitely detained. Secretly shot on a mobile phone by Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani while detained on Manus, in Papua New Guinea, the film is a collaboration with Dutch-Iranian filmmaker Arash Kamali Sarvestani. Boochani recounts, via the testimonies of fellow inmates, the abuse and violence inflicted and the precarious state of limbo they find themselves in. Chauka, the name of the dreaded solitary confinement unit within the detention centre, was originally the name of a beautiful bird and symbol of the Manus Island. By interweaving dialogue with two Manusian men and shots of daily life on the island, the film gives a much-needed voice to Manus inhabitants, understandably distressed by the current situation. With marked restraint, the film exposes lives broken by shocking immigration policies.
0.0Bob Woodruff’s daring 880-mile journey along the China-North Korea border examines the delicate relationship between the two countries and the United States.
7.7The Dynasty by the Direkt36 investigative center tells the story of the business dealings of the Prime Minister’s family over several decades. With hidden camera footage, it also shows the luxurious world built by Viktor Orbán’s son-in-law István Tiborcz and his daughter Ráhel Orbán.
9.2It is the year 2546. Corporations rule the world, and an agent is on a secret mission to explore the untold stories of the past. His journey leads him into a secret virtual reality where one corporation has recreated the 1980s, an era that witnessed the birth of video game development, an event in which a politically and economically restricted small European country, Hungary, had a significant role. He discovers a strange but exciting world, where computers were smuggled through the Iron Curtain and serious engineers started developing games. This small country was still under Soviet pressure when a group of people managed to set up one of the first game development studios in the world, and western computer stores started clearing room on their shelves for Hungarian products.
0.0To cool the heat on the asylum debate - the biggest 'hot potato' in Australian politics, we took a hot potato food van around the country in the lead up to the 2013 Federal Election. The mission? To see what Australia really thinks asylum seekers. This is an account of this journey.
0.0An absurd game of “finding happiness” is being played by local Latvian coyotes* and illegal immigrants on the Russian and the European Union border. It is a game with no winner – all participants are driven to play by the sense of despair. While one side leaves home and undertakes a perilous journey to the other side of the globe, hoping to spend the rest of their lives in a free country, the other side risks their freedom to earn a chance to stay right where they are, in their homeland. *coyote – someone who smuggles illegal immigrants
5.0Tinder. Woman looking for a man, man looking for a woman. It could have been so simple if she wasn't Israeli and the "man nearby" wasn't behind the wall, in the East Bank of the Jordan River. Israeli filmmaker Ines Moldavski meets Palestinian men she met on the Internet to get them to talk about their need for love and desire to possess.
6.8The documentary was shot in the prison for juvenile delinquents in Hungary. It does not aim at judging whether the perpetrators were convicted rightly or not but, given the burden they carry, how they can reintegrate into society after they are released.
0.0What does it mean to belong to a place, a country? In a south Tel Aviv elementary school, that question is addressed head-on by a fourth-grade class and their teacher. The children are asylum seekers whose families mostly do not have a legal status in Israel, yet learn, sing and play in Hebrew all the while examining their identity and sense of belonging.