Hauling blackboards on their backs, two educators venture into the desolate mountainous terrain of Iranian Kurdistan to promote literacy. Going separate ways, the teachers find themselves latching on ... Read more
Iranian writer/director Samira Makhmalbaf directs At Five in the Afternoon, co-scripted by her father, Mohsen Makhmalbaf (director of Kandahar). In the bombed-out ruins of post-Taliban Kabul, Noqreh (... Read more
An opus in three parts, "Iraq In Fragments" offers a series of intimate, passionately-felt portraits: A fatherless 11-year-old is apprenticed to the domineering owner of a Baghdad garage; Sadr ... Read more
A wilful young boy follows his just as obstinate grandmother in a journey across Iraq, determined to discover the fate of her missing son, Ahmed's father, who never returned from war.
Iraq, 1988. Young husband and father Ako is forced to join Saddam Hussein's army. The unwilling soldier dreams of fleeing the country, but his wife Selma refuses to leave while her old bedridden ... Read more
Mamo, an old and legendary Kurdish musician living in Iran, plans to give one final concert in Iraqi Kurdistan. After seven months of trying to get a permit and rounding up his ten sons, he sets out ... Read more
Bahman Ghobadi's tragic, yet unsentimental first feature is influenced by his own childhood in Iran's Kurdistan. In a remote Kurdish village on the Iran-Iraq border, five motherless children endure ... Read more
The movie opens with a fictionalized depiction of a real-life incident: the arrest on July 4, 2003 of 11 Turkish special forces soldiers and 13 civilians by U.S. forces of the 173rd Airborne ... Read more
A harsh portrait of Turkey, its people and its authorities, shown through the stories of five prisoners given a week's home leave, and the problems they encounter in adjusting to the world outside.