Abdul & Hamza
2015 · 49m · Documentary
Abdul & Hamza, two Somali immigrants, are hiding in an abandoned house near Serbo-Romanian border.
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All this Roughness
2020
An unnamed passer-by is forced to trace a circular route inside an abandoned tram station, facing loss and time. The broken walls act as a channel, transmitting fragmentary, blurred and analogical memories.
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The President vs. the Pirates
2013
The make or break story of a Somali-Australian refugee who went back to where he came from to do battle with ruthless pirates and Islamic militants - and transform his broken homeland into a modern African State.
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The State of Arizona
2014
From PBS: Arizona's enforcement-led policy, which grew out of its unique position as a frontline border state, is reshaping the national conversation around immigration reform. With dozens of states considering a similar approach, THE STATE OF ARIZONA holds up a mirror, asking Americans who they are, and who they want to be.
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Travelers
2023
The diaspora of Filipinos around the globe is driven mostly by the economics of supply and demand. The yearning for something better, stability, and self-validation leads a handful of sojourners from the provinces of the Philippines into the arms of one of its former colonial masters — the USA. But what happens when they finally get what they want? And how? Filmmaker Dennis Empalmado explores the musings of Filipino expatriates and hopeful immigrants in "Naglalakbay" (Travelers).
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No Roads In
2017 · ★ 10
An abandoned homestead, twelve songs and five days to cut an album. A journey into how the power of music transforms our life.
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A Land Betrayed
1963 · ★ 6
Produced by Alfred Higgins Productions with assistance from the University of Missouri-Columbia’s Academic Support Center Film Library, Keep America Beautiful, Inc., and Keep Los Angeles Beautiful, Inc., the 1963 short film A Land Betrayed examines the various ways people have spread the “cancer of ugliness” across America and offers call-to-action solutions to combat the nation-wide problem.
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Se Shin Sa
2017
"Se Shin Sa" is a hybrid of fiction and documentary portraying an undocumented immigrant woman living and working as a masseuse in Korean town, L.A.
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Critical Incident: Death at the Border
2025 · ★ 5.6
Revisits the 2010 death of Anastasio Hernández-Rojas, an undocumented Mexican immigrant who died while in custody at the border. When eye-witness video emerges, it sparks a far-reaching investigation from a border checkpoint to Washington D.C. CRITICAL INCIDENT chronicles journalists’, lawyers’, and family members’ efforts to explore the Border Patrol’s involvement in the incident, ultimately pointing to cover-ups, and uncovering the existence of a little-known unit inside the agency that had been involved in other border related incident.
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Band of Exile
1994
Here in Toronto, four young Somali refugees are finishing high school. What did they bring with them? What did they find in Canada? Their testimonies, about us and about themselves, interspersed with newsreel footage and sequences of a theatrical creation in which they put all their soul, make them immediately endearing and overturn many prejudices held against refugees. A film that makes you want to get to know them better.
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Undocumented in the Pandemic
2020
With The Marshall Project and the Pulitzer Center, a look at one immigrant mother’s struggle to keep her children safe and housed, with her husband detained by ICE in a facility where COVID is spreading. Also in this two-part hour, Love, Life & the Virus.
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Golden Land
2022 · ★ 6.5
When Finnish-Somalian Mustafe discovers his ancestors’ land in the horn of Africa is full of copper and gold, he decides to swap his family’s safe but boring life in the Nordics for Somaliland, a self-declared state in East Africa. As Mustafe struggles to lift the treasures from underground, his children embark on a bumpy journey to uncover where they really belong.
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The Pirate Tapes
2011 · ★ 6
Exposing piracy in Somalia from the inside out, The Pirates Tapes follows Mohamed Ashareh, a young Somali-Canadian, as he travels to Somalia in hopes of joining an active pirate cell. Armed only with a hidden camera, Mohamed works his way into a cell run by a ruthless warlord, Jama Donyal, and is assigned to his first hijacking mission. When things take an unexpected turn, Mohamed finds himself on the run from the law with the danger of execution looming.
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