Global Film Initiative

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The White Meadows
The otherworldly salt islands of Iran’s Lake Urmia provide the fittingly surreal setting for director Mohammad Rasoulof’s mesmerizing fable. "I've come to listen to people’s heartaches and take away tears," says an old boatman as he rows among the gray waters and white salt...Watch Movie -
Leo's Room
In the heart of Montevideo, the affable but secretly troubled Leo wraps himself in the comfort of his small rented room, unmotivated to finish his college thesis or find a job and content with infrequent visits from his girlfriend. After their six-month relationship ends, Leo begins to break out...Watch Movie -
Getting Home
In this soulful and humane comedy, Zhao, a middle-aged construction worker, struggles to fulfill a dying co-worker's last wish to be buried in China's Three Gorges region. Setting out with his colleague's body in tow, Zhao travels hundreds of miles across extraordinary countryside, encountering a...Watch Movie -
Border Cafe
In a village near Iran's border with Turkey, Reyhan, a young woman with two children, faces a difficult choice when her husband dies. Instead of agreeing to marry her brother-in-law, as required by traditional law, she chooses to support her family by re-opening her late husband's restaurant....Watch Movie
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Daughter of Keltoum
A young woman, Rallia, raised in Switzerland, travels to an isolated and barren Berber settlement located in the rocky Atlas Mountains of Algeria. Rallia's journey is one of multi-tiered discovery in terms of her relationship to her extended family, traditional Berber culture...Watch Movie -
Whisky
Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismäki seem to haunt this deadpan comedy from Uruguay about an over-sixty "love" triangle between a grumpy sock factory owner, his faithful assistant and his excessively cheerful, far more successful brother. Realizing he should at least pretend to have a life beyond the...Watch Movie -
Amnesty
A new national law brings together a man and woman visiting the same prison to meet their incarcerated spouses. ElsaпїЅs dutiful contact with her husband is part of a routine consumed with job searching, raising her two sons, and getting along with her father-in-law. When she meets Spetim, a...Watch Movie -
Mango Yellow
Guaranteed to shock even jaded viewers, Claudio Assis' debut feature is seeped in bold, sun drenched colors (a mood that extends to the oversized subtitles as well). It is a provocative tale of low-rent losers set in the coastal town of Recife, Brazil. Assis' characters seemingly stem from some...Watch Movie
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Today and Tomorrow
The seemingly unavoidable downward spiral of Argentina's middle class during the current economic and social crisis is vividly brought to life in the character of young, street-smart Paola. A talented, would-be actress with a paying job as a waitress, she is always on the run:...Watch Movie -
Possible Lives
After her husband mysteriously disappears during a business trip to Patagonia, Clara embarks on a desperate mission to find him. During her search, she makes a startling discovery: a man with an uncanny resemblance to her spouse but with another name and a wife. Convinced the stranger may be her...Watch Movie -
The Invisible Eye
Set against the backdrop of Argentina’s military regime of the 1980s, Diego Lerman’s engrossing and beautifully acted exploration of the totalitarian urge opens with a portrait of María Teresa, a lonely and deeply repressed assistant teacher at an elite Buenos Aires private...Watch Movie -
What a Wonderful World
Souad is a prostitute whose best friend is Kenza, a tough traffic cop. Kamel is a stony–eyed contract killer who receives his hit orders via the Internet; he is also Souad's favorite customer. When Kenza falls in love with Kamel, the two begin a bizarre courtship doomed by...Watch Movie
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Toll Booth
A taciturn tollbooth attendant shuffles between a suffocating home life with his ailing father and the monotony of the box where he works. Desperate to resist his father’s attempt to marry him off while determined to prove his worth by fixing his family’s broken-down car, he drives himself toward...Watch Movie -
The Shaft
In a poor mining town in western China, the stories of a father and his two children intersect and intertwine, illuminating complicated relationships hidden beneath the community’s hardened exterior. Accused of an affair with her manager, the attractive daughter of the household finds herself...Watch Movie -
The Prize
Under the cloud of a military dictatorship, a young mother and her daughter flee Buenos Aires for the seclusion of a ramshackle cottage along the windy dunes of an Argentine beach. As her mother listens for news from the radio with sad stoicism, restlessly curious seven-year-old Cecilia joins a...Watch Movie -
The Kite
In director Randa Chahal Sabbag's "fairytale for troubled times", sixteen-year old Lamia must cross a border checkpoint between Lebanon and Israel to marry a man she has never met. Neither she nor her betrothed are eager to consummate a marriage to a stranger, a matter further complicated by...Watch Movie
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The Fish Fall in Love
Atieh's singular passion is food, and her small but popular restaurant on the sleepy Caspian coast is her pride and joy. But when Aziz, her former fiancé, appears after a twenty-year absence, the women believe he has intentions of closing the restaurant, so Atieh prepares his...Watch Movie -
The Light Thief
In this colorful modern-day parable of good and evil, a humble village electrician devotes his compassion and ingenuity to destitute neighbors in a wind-swept valley of Kyrgyzstan. Played with wry humanity by writer-director Aktan Arym Kubat, the trusting Mr. Light strikes a suspect bargain with...Watch Movie -
Those Three
Just one day from completing their military training, three conscripts desert their camp and escape into the frozen wilderness of Northern Iran. Travel through this mountainous, snowbound region is dangerous, but THOSE THREE opt for the independence it promises and must now forge their way...Watch Movie -
Masquerades
After working for much of his life as a gardener in his dusty Algerian village, Mounir dreams of improving his family’s fortune and gaining a measure of respect by marrying off his narcoleptic sister, Rym, to a “real gentleman.” However, Rym has other plans; she dreams of marrying Mounir’s best...Watch Movie