Migration
​Fire at Sea (2016)

Situated 150 miles south of Sicily, Lampedusa has hit headlines as the first port of call for hundreds of thousands of African and Middle Eastern refugees hoping to make a new life in Europe. After spending months living on the island and engaging with its inhabitants, Gianfranco Rosi accumulated an incredible array of footage, portraying the history, culture and daily lives of the islanders. Focusing on 12-year-old Samuele, as he explores the land and attempts to gain mastery of the sea, the film slowly builds a breathtakingly naturalistic portrait of the Lampedusan people and the events that surround them.

Director:  Gianfranco Rosi​
Salam Neighbour (2015)

Two American filmmakers travel to the edge of war, to live with 85,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan's Za’atari camp. For the first time, experience an intimate look at the heartbreak and hope on the frontlines of the world’s most dire refugee crisis.

Directors: ​ Zach Ingrasci, Chris Temple
​The Land Between (2014)

THE Land Between offers an intimate insight into the hidden and desperate lives of Sub-Saharan African migrants living in the mountains of northern Morocco. For most, their dream is to enter Europe by jumping a highly-militarised barrier into Melilla, a Spanish enclave on the African continent.

With unique and unprecedented access, this film documents the everyday life of these migrants trapped in limbo, as well as the extreme violence and constant mistreatment they face from both the Moroccan and Spanish authorities. It also explores many universal questions, including how and why people are prepared to risk everything, including their life, to leave their country, their family and friends, in search of a new and better life.

Director: David Fedele​
​Into the Film: The hidden Victims of Austerity in Greece  (2013)
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A hard hitting documentary which shows the plight of refugees and migrants in recession hit Athens, Into The Fire is a film with a difference.

In times of severe austerity things look bleak for Greek people, but they're far worse for those who have recently arrived. Without housing, legal papers or support, migrants in Greece are faced with increasing and often violent racism at the hands of the growing Nazi party Golden Dawn and the police in Athens. Many are trapped by EU laws and legislation of other EU countries meaning they'd be returned to Greece if they managed to get to another member state, they are desperate to leave the country.
Pushing the Elephant (2010)

In the late 1990s, Rose Mapendo lost her family and home to the violence that engulfed the Democratic Republic of Congo. She emerged advocating forgiveness and reconciliation. In a country where ethnic violence has created seemingly irreparable rifts among Tutsis, Hutus and other Congolese, this remarkable woman is a vital voice in her beleaguered nation’s search for peace. Now, Rose is confronted with teaching one her most recalcitrant students how to forgive—Nangabire, the daughter who remained behind.

Director: Beth Davenport and Elizabeth Mandel
JAULA DE ORO (2013)
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A road movie about teenage immigrants and their journey to the U.S.

Director: Diego Quemada - Diez
​La pirogue (2012)
A group of African men leave Senegal in a pirogue captained by a local fisherman to undertake the treacherous crossing of the Atlantic to Spain where they believe better lives and prospects are waiting for them.

Director: ​Moussa Touré
When I Saw You (2012)

Jordan, 1967. The world is alive with change: brimming with reawakened energy, new styles, music and an infectious sense of hope. In Jordan, a different kind of change is underway as tens of thousands of refugees pour across the border from Palestine. Having been separated from his father in the chaos of war, Tarek, 11, and his mother Ghaydaa, are amongst this latest wave of refugees. Placed in “temporary” refugee camps made up of tents and prefab houses until they would be able to return, they wait, like the generation before them who arrived in 1948. With difficulties adjusting to life in Harir camp and a longing to be reunited with his father, Tarek searches a way out, and discovers a new hope emerging with the times. Eventually his free spirit and curious nature lead him to a group of people on a journey that will change their lives. 

Director: ​Annemarie Jacir
Terraferma (2011)


Riding the wave of Italian immigrant dramas that have been topical for years, writer-director Emanuele Crialese’s Terraferma is an unremarkable story flying a passionate moral banner. The film contrasts Italy’s traditional humanist values to inhuman new laws aimed at stemming illegal immigration and insists it’s morally imperative to rebel against them.

Director: Emanuele Crialese


A Better Life (2011)

A gardener in East L.A. struggles to keep his son away from gangs and immigration agents while trying to give his son the opportunities he never had.

Director: Chris Weitz
A Mother's Story (2011)

Medy, a make-up artist, is given the chance of a lifetime to accompany a concert start for a week-long trip to America. Promising her family to be home soon she ends up being convinced to stay in America longer by a former classmate she happened to meet. Things take a turn for the worse however when America isn't too friendly to her and her young daughter back home is taken to hospital and she returns to Manila with nothing. 

Director: John-D Lazatin
District 9 (2009)

​An extraterrestrial race forced to live in slum-like conditions on Earth suddenly finds a kindred spirit in a government agent who is exposed to their biotechnology.

Dicector: Neil Blomkam
Welcome (2009)

17-year-old Bilal has spent the last three months travelling illegally across Europe, in an attempt to reunite with his girlfriend Mina who has moved with her family to England. The long journey is almost over when he finally reaches Calais, on the far northern coast of France; he can literally see his destination from across the Channel. But with all legal options exhausted, Bilal resolves that his only option is to learn to swim, and make the dangerous crossing himself.         

Bilal seeks the help of middle-aged swimming instructor Simon (Vincent Lindon), who is privately reeling from impending divorce from his socially-conscious wife Marion. In an effort to win her back, Simon impulsively - and uncharacteristically - risks everything by taking Bilal under his wing. 

Director: Philippe Lioret
Children of Men (2006)

In 2027, in a chaotic world in which women have become somehow infertile, a former activist agrees to help transport a miraculously pregnant woman to a sanctuary at sea.
In This World (2002)

In the Shamshatoo Refugee Camp in the North West Frontier Province in Pakistan, there are 53,000 refugees living in sub-human conditions since 1979 with the Soviet Union invasion and 2001 with the USA bombing and invasion of Afghanistan.

The family of the Afghan Enayat and his cousin Jamal decides to send them illegally to London to have a better life. They hire coyotes to smuggle the cousins through Iran and Turkey to Italy and finally London hidden inside trucks and containers.

However, the long journey locked in a container with other families separates the cousins and on 9th August 2002, Jamal has his asylum application refused in London.

Director: Michael Winterbottom

An American Rhapysody (2001)

A young Hungarian girl struggles to find her place in the world when she's reunited with her parents in the USA years after she was left behind during their flight from the communist country in the 1950s.

Director: Eva Gardos
Home (2016)

Thousands of men, women and children struggle to get into Europe as a comfortable English family leave, on what appears to be a holiday.

Director: Daniel Mulloy
​Kandahar (2001)

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.

Director: Monsen Makhmalbaf​


America, America (1963)

A young Anatolian Greek, entrusted with his family's fortune, loses it en route to Istanbul and dreams of going to America.

Director: Elia Kazan
Crossing Over (2009) 

Crossing Over is a multi-character canvas about immigrants of different nationalities struggling to achieve legal status in Los Angeles. The film deals with the border, document fraud, the asylum and green card process, work-site enforcement, naturalization, the office of counter terrorism and the clash of cultures.

Director: Wayne Kramer


Days of Waiting (1990)

The story of Estelle Ishigo, one of the few Caucasians interned with Japanese Americans during World War II. The wife of a Japanese American, Ishigo refused to be separated from her husband and was interned along with him. Based on the personal papers of Estelle Ishigo and her novel Lone Heart Mountain.

Director: Steven Okazaki


Dirty Pretty Things (2002)

An illegal Nigerian immigrant discovers the unpalatable side of London life.

Director: Stephen Frears
Distant Lights (2003)

This movie reflects on the situation around the border between Poland and Germany. The fate of many single characters creates a picture of life in this region: Some Ukrainians want to cross the border illegal to get into Germany, a company wants to build a new factory, a Polish taxi driver desperately needs money to buy his daughter a communion dress, and so on.

Director: Hans-Christian Schmid


Eden is West (2009)

A drama centered around the illegal immigrants living in the EU.

Director: Costa Gavras
El Norte (1983)

Mayan Indian peasants, tired of being thought of as nothing more than "brazos fuertes" ("strong arms", i.e., manual laborers) and organizing in an effort to improve their lot in life, are discovered by the Guatemalan army. After the army destroys their village and family, a brother and sister, teenagers who just barely escaped the massacre, decide they must flee to "El Norte" ("the North", i.e., the USA). After receiving clandestine help from friends and humorous advice from a veteran immigrant on strategies for traveling through Mexico, they make their way by truck, bus and other means to Los Angeles, where they try to make a new life as young, uneducated, and illegal immigrants.

Director: Gregory Nava


Eternity and a Day (1998)

Famous writer Alexander is very ill and has little time left to live. He meets a little boy on the street, who is an illegal immigrant from Albania, and goes on a journey with him to take the boy home.

Director: Theodoros Angelopoulos
Frozen River (2008)

After her husband takes off in their family vehicle for an unknown destination, Ray Eddy attempts to survive alone, raising two sons, Richard and James, and works part-time at Yankee Dollar, near Saint Lawrence River near Quebec and New York State. One day she witnesses a Mohawk woman driving their family vehicle, she follows and confronts her, finds out that the woman's name is Lila Littlewolf, and is actively engaged in smuggling illegal immigrants into the United States via a treacherous frozen river. The lure of money attracts Eddy and she decides to join forces with her new associate.

Director: Courtney Hunt
Illegal (2010)

Tania, a young Russian woman who lives illegally in Belgium with her 13-year-old son Ivan. Constantly on her guard, she dreads police checks until the day she is arrested. Mother and son are separated and Tania is placed in a detention center. She will do anything to be reunited with her son but won't manage to avoid threats of deportation.

Director: Olivier Masset-Depasse


In America (2002) 

A family of Irish immigrants adjust to life on the mean streets of Hell's Kitchen while also grieving the death of a child.

Director: Jim Sheridan


In Darkness (2011)

A dramatization of one man's rescue of Jewish refugees in the Nazi-occupied Polish city of Lvov.

Director: Agnieszka Holland


In this world (2002)

Enayat and Jamal are Afghan refugees who live in a camp in Peshawar and try to escape to Great Britain by the help of people smugglers. Their dangerous journey leads them along the "silk road" through Pakistan, Iran and Turkey towards London.

Director: Michael Winterbottom
Inch'Allah dimanche (2001)

The story of an immigrant woman struggling against old world traditions. Zouina leaves her homeland with her three children to join her husband in France, where he's been living for the past ten years. In a land and culture foreign to her, Zouina struggles against her mother-in-law's tyrannical hand and her husband's distrustful bitterness in an attempt to adjust to her life in exile.

Director: Yamina Benguigui
Inocente (2012)

A personal and vibrant coming of age story about a young artist's determination never to surrender to the bleakness of her surroundings. At 15, Inocente refuses to let her dream of becoming an artist be caged by being an undocumented immigrant forced to live homeless for the last nine years. Color is her personal revolution and its sweep on her canvases creates a world that looks nothing like her own dark past. 'Inocente' is both a timeless story about the transformative power of art and a timely snapshot of the new face of homelessness in America: children. The challenges are staggering, but the hope in her story proves that the hand she has been dealt does not define her, her dreams do.

Director: Sean Fine, Andrea Nix


Journey of Hope (1990)

The story of a Turkish poor family who tries to emigrate illegally to Switzerland.

Director: Xavier Koller


Kandahar (2001)

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.

Director: Mohsen Makhmalbaf
La Promesse (1996)

Igor and his father, Roger, are making a decent living renting apartments to illegal immigrants and sometimes working them illegally (among other scams). But when the building inspector pays a surprise visit and Amidou falls off a scaffold in his hurry to hide, things start to unravel, particularly when Igor makes a promise to the injured Amidou that ultimately exposes the different values of Igor and Roger, and of Amidou's wife, Assita.

Director: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne
Live and Become (2005)

When a drought hits Ethiopia in 1984 Ethiopian Jews are to be sent to Israel. On the day of the departure a young Jewish boy dies and a Christian mother sends her son in his place telling him only to return when he has become something. In Israel, suffering racism, he falls in love with a white Jewish girl with a racist father which does not aid his course. 

Director: Radu Mihaileanu
Lorna's Silence (2008)

In order to become the owner of a snack bar with her boyfriend, Lorna, a young Albanian woman living in Belgium, becomes an accomplice to a diabolical plan devised by a criminal named Fabio. Fabio works as a taxi driver but his main activities consist of shady deals. This latest scheme involves Claudy, a junkie who needs money to fund his addiction; Andrei, the cigarette smuggler with loads of money but needs a legal way in to Europe. Things get interesting when things don't go according to plan and Lorna starts to have second thoughts.

Directors: Jean - Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne
Lost Boys of Sudan (2003)

Lost Boys of Sudan is a feature-length documentary that follows two Sudanese refugees on an extraordinary journey from Africa to America. Orphaned as young boys in one of Africa's cruelest civil wars, Peter Dut and Santino Chuor survived lion attacks and militia gunfire to reach a refugee camp in Kenya along with thousands of other children. From there, remarkably, they were chosen to come to America. Safe at last from physical danger and hunger, a world away from home, they find themselves confronted with the abundance and alienation of contemporary American suburbia. 

Directors: Megan Mylan, Jon Shenk


Man Push Cart (2005)

A night in the life of a former Pakistani rock star who now sells coffee from his push cart on the streets of Manhattan.

Director: Ramin Bahrani
Mother of Mine (2005)

During World War II, more than 70,000 Finnish children were evacuated to neutral Sweden to avoid the conflict. "Mother of Mine", tackles that painful patch of history in a tale of 9-year-old Eero, a child who increasingly feels abandoned by his biological Finnish mother and yet not attached to his Swedish surrogate mom. When he is returned to Finland, his confusion intensifies. 

Director: Klaus Haro
Moving To Mars (2009)

Moving to Mars charts the epic journey made by two Burmese families from a vast refugee camp on the Thai/Burma border to their new homes in the UK. At times hilarious, at times emotional, their travels provide a fascinating and unique insight not only into the effects of migration, but also into one of the most important current political crises - Burma. 

Director: Mat Withecross


Nuclear Nation (2013)

A documentary chronicling the lives of Japanese refugees displaced by the 2011 tsunami and nuclear meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi.

Director: Atsushi Funahashi


Rain in a Dry Land (2006)

A searingly intimate portrait of two families who leave behind a legacy of slavery in Africa to discover new challenges in 21st century America.

Director: Anne Makepeace


Sand and Sorrow (2007)

A documentary about the events that led to the rise of Darfur's Arab-dominated government and the international community's "legacy of failure" to respond to the genocide carried out in the country.

Director: Paul Freedman


Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars (2003)

The story of a group of courageous musicians who form a band in a West African refugee camp to keep their hope alive.

Directors: Zach Niles, Banker White


Terraferma (2011)

A Sicilian family deals with the arrival of a group of immigrants on their island.

Director: Emanuele Crialese
The Art of Water (2000)

Shaw is an operative for the United Nations' covert dirty-tricks squad, using espionage and quasi-ethical tactics to secure peace and cooperation. When a shipping container full of dead Vietnamese refugees turns up on the docks and China's ambassador is gunned down at a dinner celebrating a new trade agreement with China and the US, Shaw is framed for the murder and must evade the FBI and Triad gangsters to find out what is really going on. 

Director: Christian Duguay
The Emigrants (1971)

In the middle of the 19th century, Kristina and Karl-Oskar live in a small rural village in Smaaland (southern Sweden). They get married and try to make a living on a small spot of land. However, the small size of their land, the infertile soil, and some bad harvests makes it tough. One of their children even starve to death. Thus, they decide to emigrate to the U.S. They meet a group of farmers with their families planing the emigration under the leadership of a banned priest. They sell everything and embark for the U.S. The journey on the sailing ship is long and tedious. Some of the emigrants will never reach the New World. 

Director: Jan Troell


The Immigrant (1917)

Charlie is an immigrant who endures a challenging voyage and gets into trouble as soon as he arrives in America.

Director: Charles Chaplin


The Long Way Home (1997)

The story of the post World War II Jewish refugee situation from liberation to the establishment of the modern state of Israel.

Director: Mark Jonathan Herris


The New Land (1972)

The life of an immigrant family from Sweden in the Minnesota's forests, during mid 19th century

Director: Jan Troell


Under the Same Moon (2007)

A young Mexican boy travels to the U.S. to find his mother after his grandmother passes away.

Director: Patricia Riggen
Which Way Home (2007)

"Which Way Home" is a feature documentary film that follows unaccompanied child migrants, on their journey through Mexico, as they try to reach the United States. We follow children like Olga and Freddy, nine-year old Hondurans, who are desperately trying to reach their parents in the US.; children like Jose, a ten-year old El Salvadoran, who has been abandoned by smugglers and ends up alone in a Mexican detention center; and Kevin, a canny, streetwise fourteen-year old Honduran, whose mother hopes that he will reach the U.S. and send money back to her. These are stories of hope and courage, disappointment and sorrow. They are the children you never hear about; the invisible ones. 

Director: Rebecca Cammisa


The Terminal (2004)

An eastern immigrant finds himself stranded in JFK airport, and must take up temporary residence there.

Director: Steven Spielberg
The Tunnel (2001)

Based on a true story a group of East Berliners escaping to the West. Harry Melchior was a champion East German swimmer at odds with the system under which he has already been imprisoned. On his own escape, he is determined the arrange the escape to the West of his sister and her family. The idea of the tunnel is born, but the project does not run smoothly. The participants struggle not only with the massive logistics of their task, but betrayal from friends in the East. And always the East German police are close to discovering the plot. 

Director: Roland Suso Richter


The Visitor (2007)

A college professor travels to New York City to attend a conference and finds a young couple living in his apartment.

Director: Thomas McCarthy
Welcome (2009)

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 is captured with authenticity, from the point of view of people who arrived there knowing nothing about France. This immigrant drama, with wonderful performances by the actors, is a strong story which uses documentary austerity and minimalist style to create a great emotional impact. 

Director: Philippe Lioret