Global Migration Film Festival 2020 free online screenings Europe
Free Online Screening
Save the Dates
14th - 18th DECEMBER 2020, 19:00 CET
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) is launching its annual Global Migration Film Festival 2020, presenting five selected films for screening worldwide. This will mark IOM´s fifth year presenting documentaries, features and short films that explore the themes of migration and human mobility.
This year’s film festival is taking place despite the global health emergency brought on by COVID-19, with the selected films offered through a virtual platform.
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Ismet is a Turkish soldier, recently retired, who had served on the Turkey-Greece border as a Coast Guard Commander. Now, he’s struggling to adjust to a new life as a civilian. Communication with his family is difficult. His lone son has emigrated to the U.S., where his wife now wants to follow. And there is a new complication: two Syrian refugees, Omar and Mariye, are now neighbours. Ismet must face his personal prejudices as well as his political views, and learn to accept what he formerly rejected.
In 2019, following months of protests across the country, Sudan’s military removed thirty-year dictator Omar al-Bashir. It also cracked down violently on a civilian sit-in outside its headquarters. The Internet was shut down, leaving only those outside Sudan to voice a plea for a peaceful transition to civilian government. An ocean away, Sudanese-American poets and musicians gather in major American cities to perform in support of the revolution. At the heart of this film is a conversation about identity, belonging and the uncertain future of Sudan, from which Diaspora Sudanese have been physically isolated. What happens when they can only watch from afar?
“Amygdaliá” is a tree that blooms in the beginning of spring. It is also the word that haunts one of the film narrators as a little girl, when she has just arrived in Greece. Along with her, four more women share their fragmented memories of what it means to be a foreigner in a land that often resembles a Mediterranean postcard. In this film people, places and things come together and part ways as in a dream. The natural world becomes a place of refuge and companionship for a group of women who try to reassert their identities and invent a new language, out of landscapes and gestures in contemporary Greece.
Women’s Country follows the Turkish director’s everlasting search for the meaning of home. Often defined by memories and people, is “home” something transient or something stable? And can it be tied always to a location? In an era where thousands of people are making perilous journeys to find safe homes while others discover new habitable planets in space, these questions cover more than the personal questions of a filmmaker coming to the USA. Displaced by the war in Syria and resettled in Florida, Fatima and Huda join the director in an exploration of all building a new home means; to leave things and people behind, by choice or not, and how the past is woven into the present.
When Israeli artist and TED Fellow, Raffael Lomas turned 50, he knew he wanted his next work to have meaning. So, when he learned about a group of South Sudanese children who had been raised in Israel and later deported to South Sudan, he jumped at a chance to make art with them. He wanted to “see what would happen.” What happened, over the course of several days during the summer vacation of 2014, Raffael and the students built a house made out of 8000 paper clips – 8000 points of connection - symbolizing the meaning of home.
MORE ABOUT THE GMFF2020 HERE
"IOM’s Global Migration Film Festival is unique in that it uses the power of film to highlight the positive attributes and challenges of migration in a world on the move. It features stories from places rarely in the headlines and offers a rich tapestry of action and aspiration".
António Vitorino
Director-General - International Organization for Migration (IOM)
