I Was a Stranger (2025)

Kandahar

After an Afghanistan-born woman who lives in Canada receives a letter from her suicidal sister, she takes a perilous journey through Afghanistan to try to find her.

The House by the Sea

By a little bay near Marseille lies a picturesque villa owned by an old man. His three children have gathered by his side for his last days. It’s time for them to weigh up what they have inherited of their father’s ideals and the community spirit he created in this magical place. The arrival, at a nearby cove, of a group of boat people will throw these moments of reflection into turmoil.

Birds Are Singing in Kigali

We meet ornithologist Anna in 1994 just as genocide is raging in Rwanda, perpetrated by the majority Hutus against the Tutsis. Anna manages to save the daughter of a colleague whose family has been murdered, and she takes her to Poland. But the woman returns to Rwanda to visit the graves of her loved ones. The director originally worked on the movie with her husband Krzysztof Krauze (My Nikifor – Crystal Globe, KVIFF 2005), but after his death in 2014 she eventually finished this challenging picture alone.

All That's Left of You

After a Palestinian teen confronts Israeli soldiers at a West Bank protest, his mother recounts the series of events that led him to that fateful moment, starting with his grandfather’s forced displacement.

Blood Alley

An American Merchant Marine captain, rescued from a Chinese Communist jail by local villagers, is "shanghaied" into transporting the entire village to Hong Kong on an ancient paddle steamer.

Turtles Can Fly

Turtles Can Fly tells the story of a group of young children near the Turkey-Iraq border. They clean up mines and wait for the Saddam regime to fall.

Night Shapes

The Pope is in town and the night of his stay is anything but heavenly for some of Berlin′s inhabitants. Rich and poor, down-and-outs and policemen, street kids and taxi drivers - in their search for a little bit of happiness, they all end up on an amusing and at times harrowing odyssey through the labyrinth of the big city.

All Saints

Michael Spurlock decides to trade in his corporate sales career to become a pastor. Unfortunately, his first assignment is to close a country church and sell the prime piece of land where it sits. He soon has a change of heart when the church starts to welcome refugees from Burma. Spurlock now finds himself working with the refugees to turn the land into a working farm to pay the church's bills.

Salvation Has No Name

A troupe of clowns gather to perform a story about a priest and a refugee, but as their misguided tale unfolds, the boundaries between fiction and reality begin to fray.

Hotel Rwanda

Inspired by true events, this film takes place in Rwanda in the 1990s when more than a million Tutsis were killed in a genocide that went mostly unnoticed by the rest of the world. Hotel owner Paul Rusesabagina houses over a thousand refuges in his hotel in attempt to save their lives.

Tears of the Sun

Navy SEAL Lieutenant A.K. Waters and his elite squadron of tactical specialists are forced to choose between their duty and their humanity, between following orders by ignoring the conflict that surrounds them, or finding the courage to follow their conscience and protect a group of innocent refugees. When the democratic government of Nigeria collapses and the country is taken over by a ruthless military dictator, Waters, a fiercely loyal and hardened veteran is dispatched on a routine mission to retrieve a Doctors Without Borders physician.

The New Country

A 15-year-old Somalian boy meets a 40-year-old Iranian man in a refugee camp in Skåne, in the south of Sweden. With the threat of deportation hanging over them, they decide to take their faiths in their own hands and together they go on a journey in the Swedish summer.

Aïssa

Aïssa is a Congolese immigrant in France. She says that she is under eighteen but the authorities consider her an adult. To determine if she can be deported, a doctor must give her a physical examination.

Refuge

Refugees are captured by border patrol officers as one woman escapes to find herself surviving on her own in a foreign land.

To a Land Unknown

Cousins Chatila and Reda are saving to pay for fake passports to get out of Athens. When Reda loses their hard-earned cash to his drug addiction, Chatila hatches an extreme plan to pose as smugglers in an attempt to get them out of their desperate situation before it is too late.

Woman of the Year

Rival reporters Sam Craig and Tess Harding fall in love and get married, only to find their relationship strained when Sam comes to resent Tess' hectic lifestyle.

Two Women

A young widow flees from Rome during WWII and takes her lonely twelve-year-old-daughter to her rural hometown but the horrors of war soon catch up with them.

Welcome

Bilal is 17 years old, a Kurdish boy from Iraq. He sets off on an adventure-filled journey across Europe. He wants to get to England to see his love who lives there. Bilal finally reaches Calais, but how do you cover 32 kilometers of the English Channel when you can't swim? The boy soon discovers that his trip won't be as easy as he imagined... The community of struggling illegal aliens in Calais

Arch of Triumph

In the winter of 1938, Paris is crowded with refugees from the Nazis, who live in the black shadows of night, trying to evade deportation. One such is Dr. Ravic, who practices medicine illegally and stalks his old Nazi enemy Haake with murder in mind. One rainy night, Ravic meets Joan Madou, a kept woman cast adrift by her lover's sudden death. Against Ravic's better judgment, they become involved in a doomed affair.

Kannathil Muthamittal

A little girl is told by her parents that she is adopted. Determined to find her birth mother, her family eventually agrees to take her to Sri Lanka, where they encounter the militant group known as the Tamil Tigers.

Strayed

Fleeing the June 1940 arrival of Hitler's army in Paris, a young war widow and her two children are rescued from dive-bombing German fighters by a cocky, reckless teenager. He finds them refuge in an abandoned house, but despite the fact that the family quickly comes to be depending much on his cunning and survival abilities, their cohabitation proves uneasy.

Curveball

Although he already has searched Iraq unsuccessfully for weapons of mass destruction as a member of a UN mission, German bio-weapons expert Arndt Wolf is still obsessed with the idea that Saddam Hussein is hiding something. Nobody around him is interested in this topic any more. This changes abruptly when an Iraqi asylum seeker claims to have been involved in the manufacture of chemical weapons. The German Federal Intelligence Service summons Dr. Wolf to ascertain the legitimacy of the claims made by the informant, who has been given the code name “Curveball”.

Passage of Life

Burmese boy Kaung and his family emigrated to Japan with the hope for a better life. They have lived in Tokyo for years, but never obtained a visum. The daily strain of their illegal residence eventually starts to tear the family apart.

Sweetness in the Belly

Orphaned in Africa as a child, Lilly escapes to England as a refugee, fleeing civil war in Ethiopia. Lost in this cold new world, Lilly embraces the immigrant community in London, attempting to reunite people with their scattered families. But as her friend Amina discovers, Lilly's mission isn't purely selfless: a passionate lost love affair is revealed.

Dreamers

Caught without papers, Isio is relocated and trapped inside Hatchworth Removal Centre, where she learns that finding love, friendship and freedom sometimes means doing the wrong things.

Journey for Margaret

An American newspaperman and his wife, end up in London after several retreats in the opening days of WWII. After a shrapnel wound and loss of her baby she returns to America. War weary, he is forced to do a story about war orphans, where he meets Margaret.

Up at the Villa

Superficial people are revealed and drastically changed by circumstance or luck in this a tale of death, seduction, blackmail and theft among British and Americans in Florence in the turbulent days just before World War II.

The Story of Good People

The return of a refugee from the police to his grandparents' village disrupts the life of the villagers.

The Lawyer

Marius is a highly successful lawyer based in Vilnius. He becomes obsessed with Ali, a handsome Syrian refugee he first encounters in an online chatroom run out of Belgrade. Marius is rich and enjoys a vibrant social and cultural life. Nevertheless, he feels that something is missing from it. The journey from Lithuania to Serbia is a relatively short one, but can the two navigate their way through the gulf that separates their very different lives? And how do they deal with the precarious obstacles of the physical borders that stand between them? Written and directed by Romas Zabarauskas, The Lawyer questions assumptions about what it means to be an immigrant and the possibilities offered by life in contemporary Europe.

Parvaneh

Parvaneh is a young Afghan immigrant who recently arrived at a transit centre for asylum seekers in the Swiss Alps. The only things she has got to know yet are the rural area surrounding the centre and the centre itself.

Unwanted

A lonely boy, who lives in Amsterdam with his refugee mother from Kosovo, keeps getting into trouble while yearning for her acceptance. But the traumas caused by the war, which his mother hides away from him, turn his world upside down.

My Name Is Loh Kiwan

After defecting from North Korea, Loh Kiwan struggles to obtain refugee status in Belgium, where he encounters a dejected woman who has lost all hope.

Open Cage

Anna, a young photojournalist from Berlin, travels to Serbia to make a photo documentary about refugees. Upon her arrival to Belgrade, Serbia's capital, Anna finds out that she can't go about her task the way she had planned. Through the cabdriver Dzeki, she meets the distrustful but interesting young refugee Maja who works at a nearby fast food restaurant. Miserable with her life in Serbia, Maja dreams of a new beginning somewhere abroad. In an attempt to successfully finish her project, Anna starts photographing Maja, secretly making a documentary about her. Blinded by the wish to change her life, Maja doesn't realize Anna's true intentions.

The Boat Is Full

During World War II, Switzerland severely limited refugees: "Our boat is full." A train from Germany halts briefly in an isolated corner of Switzerland. Six people jump off seeking asylum: four Jews, a French child, and a German soldier. They seek temporary refuge with a couple who run a village inn. They pose as a family: the deserter as husband, Judith as his wife, an old man from Vienna as her father, his granddaughter and the French lad, whom they beg to keep silent, as their children. Judith's teenage brother poses as a soldier. The fabrication unravels through chance and the local constable's exact investigation. Whom will the Swiss allow to stay? Who gets deported?

Any Day Now

Bahman, Mahtab, Ramin and Donya Mehdipour are enjoying a perfect summer in a small Finnish town. Their routines are fractured by a negative decision on their application for asylum by the Finnish Immigration Service. But life must go on and the 13-year-old Ramin is about to enter an entirely new school, junior high. The Mehdipours use their last chance to appeal but continue their everyday lives, fuelled by their exceptionally positive outlook and attitude.

That Which Once Was

In 2032 an eight-year old boy, displaced by global warming, fends for himself as an environmental refugee in a hostile northern metropolis. Haunted by memories of flooding that left him homeless and orphaned, the boy forms an unexpected friendship with an Inuk ice carver who helps him confront his past.

Loving Glances

Swan is a lonely Serbian refugee in Belgrade. He hopes for a visa to follow his long-lost fiancée to Chicago, but winds up at the Happy Millennium dating agency. A warm romantic comedy with a twist.