A look at the current state of the conflict in the West Bank between settlers and Palestinians.
Social & External
Self
A portrait of two Palestinian women whose individual struggles both define and transcend the politics that have torn apart their homes and their lives. Farah Hatoum, a widow living with her children and grandchildren, and Sahar Khalifeh, a novelist from the West Bank.
The 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.
The first documentary to present an unabashed critique of the impact of the Syrian government’s agricultural and land reforms, Everyday Life in a Syrian Village delivers a powerful jab at the state’s conceit of redressing social and economic inequities.
AMIN portrays Qashqai musician Amin Aghaie, a young modern nomad and his family who despite facing steep financial, cultural and political obstacles are dedicated to their art and culture. Amin travels to remote towns and villages to record the music of the surviving masters whose numbers decline each year. His nomadic family are selling their meager belongings to help support their son's education in performance and ethnomusicology at Tchaikovsky's Conservatory in Kyiv, Ukraine, but it is not enough. Amin, desperate to finish his academic education, sells his violins one at a time just to pay for his tuition.
In Breaking Bread, exotic cuisine and a side of politics are on the menu. Dr. Nof Atamna-Ismaeel - the first Muslim Arab to win Israel's MasterChef - is on a quest to make a social change through food. And so, she founded the A-sham Arabic Food Festival in Haifa. There, pairs of Arab and Jewish chefs collaborate on mouthwatering dishes like kishek (a Syrian yogurt soup), and qatayef (a dessert typically served during Ramadan), as we savor the taste of hope and discover the food of their region free from political and religious boundaries.
The film documents modern slave trade through a number of African countries, under dictatorship rule. The filming was conducted both in public places, and sometimes with the use of hidden cameras, for high impact scenes of nudity, sex, and violence - and a few surprises, as slaves made out of peregrins to Asia, and slave traders paid in traveller checks.
An Israeli film director interviews fellow veterans of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to reconstruct his own memories of his term of service in that conflict.
On May 8, 1989, Sports Illustrated ran an article about Ultimate frisbee… about a team with no name hailing from New York City that was about to change the sport forever. From its 1968 New Jersey birth to its unanimous 2015 recognition by the International Olympic Committee, FLATBALL circles the globe to showcase four decades of world-class Ultimate and goes even further: to a set of fields in the Middle East to understand and demystify the unique spirit of the game.
A documentary on how British double-dealing during the First World War ignited the conflict between Arab and Jew in the Middle East. The bitter struggle between Arab and Jew for control of the Holy Land has caused untold suffering in the Middle East for generations. It is often claimed that the crisis originated with Jewish emigration to Palestine and the foundation of the state of Israel. Yet the roots of the conflict are to be found much earlier – in British double-dealing during the First World War. This is a story of intrigue among rival empires; of misguided strategies; and of how conflicting promises to Arab and Jew created a legacy of bloodshed which determined the fate of the Middle East.
A few years ago, the al-Mahamids fled Bashar al-Assad and Syria to settle in Montreal. A nuanced portrayal of a courageous family coping with a seemingly interminable war, thousands of kilometres away, that continues to affect their lives.
Follows the repercussions of the Israeli Security Wall and Settlement expansion in the engulfed/annexed Palestinian farming communities of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, examining the grassroots resistance movement that sprang up against it. An interminable road trip across hard and liquid borders, across a terrain that is being erased as it is being traversed.
When two young American Jews raised to unconditionally love Israel witness the mistreatment of Palestinians, they battle the old guard to create a new movement opposing Israel’s occupation, and recentering Judaism itself.
A humor-inflected history of the of the number one, covering military applications in ancient Rome, the measurement of distances in India, and the decimal system created by Leibnitz.
A verité legal drama about Judge Kholoud Al-Faqih, the first woman appointed to a Shari'a court in the Middle East, whose career provides rare insights into both Islamic law and gendered justice.
A look at one of the leaders of the Kyriat Arba colony in the West Bank.
As the U.S. planned to withdraw troops from Afghanistan in September 2021, Canadian-Afghan filmmaker and journalist Brishkay Ahmed was filming IN THE RUMBLING BELLY OF MOTHERLAND. Revealing the ongoing dangers for women reporters, and the extraordinary risks they take, this brave film provides an in-depth look into Zan TV, Kabul’s female-led news agency. A professional journalist herself, Ahmed documents both the harrowing and inspiring work of young, female journalists over the course of the two-year lead up to the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. Following parallel news stories as they unfold – two sets of national elections as well as ongoing U.S.-Taliban peace talks – the film reveals the daily hurdles Afghan female reporters and media staff face, underscoring the existential current events that threaten both Zan TV as a media outlet and the livelihoods of the women at its heart.
A group of young UN soldiers in Lebanon enters service with pro-Israeli views and a naive outlook on war. They go through a radical change of heart as they witness and film the Qana massacre. They secure video evidence indicating that Israel deliberately bombed a UN camp killing 106 refugees.
In 2014, during a trip, American Tim Bruns discovered cliffs in a small village five minutes north of Ramallah in Palestine and got to work equipping all the easy routes, then setting up climbing routes so that we can start teaching people how to climb. Bruns and Harris also opened Wadi Climbing, the first indoor climbing gym in Palestine. Today, gathered in the conflict-torn hills of Palestine, a diverse team of Bedouins, activists and urban professionals have embraced climbing as a much-needed respite from the burden of Israeli occupation. American writer and climber Andrew Bisharat visits the West Bank to explore his own roots and the power of climbing to transform lives. This documentary is part of the Reel Rock 17 series released in 2023.
In 1952 a young Egyptian colonel named Gamal Abdel Nasser led a coup that became a revolution, winning the support of millions of his countrymen. Over the next 18 years he challenged Western hegemony abroad, confronted Islamism at home, established the region’s first military authoritarian regime, and faced deep divisions among the Arabs.
Louis Theroux spends time with a small and very committed subculture of ultra-nationalist Jewish settlers. He discovers a group of people who consider it their religious and political obligation to populate some of the most sensitive areas of the West Bank, especially those with a spiritual significance dating back to the Bible. Throughout his journey, Louis gets close to the people most involved with driving the extreme end of the Jewish settler movement - finding them warm, friendly, humorous, and deeply troubling.