Deus Twesigye from Uganda was leaving for work one morning in 2010 when his ex-girlfriend threw acid on him. At that moment his life changed completely.

How does it feel to rebuild your identity and life? How to become a part of society again if you can’t get a job? When you are blamed for becoming a victim or when it’s hard to get justice. Does a human being have any other value than their physical appearance? And what happens when your life changes completely, again.

A Burning Voice combines Deus’ dance and movement, narration and poetry with subtle images of everyday life in Uganda, and creates a multilayered film exploring different sides of surviving violence and trauma.

An Hour or So is a journey through the lives of three sex workers in Egypt, telling us how their lives are influenced or have been influenced by their profession. They come from poverty and have ended up in the profession of sex workers for different reasons. They talk about their journey that led them to this profession, how they live their lives and about their future.

The film is narrated by these three women. Each one tells us her story. She talks about how her mother circumcised her and how she used her and objectified her for certain interests, and how after marriage and to this day she is still being objectified. Another woman was driven by anger after leaving her family in Upper Egypt and ending up in Cairo where she involuntarily found herself into the profession of a sex worker. One of the most compelling stories is about the day she was sold as a virgin and what it meant for her. The third woman travels abroad after using sex to get money. On her journey, she ended in the profession of sex. She profited from the profession and has enjoyed it a lot.

Belleville belle et rebelle portrays six extraordinary residents of Belleville, the Parisian immigrant neighbourhood par excellence. The charming, idiosyncratic regulars of the Vieux Belleville carry the film in a manner similar to a French film choral: Joseph, the café owner and chronicler; Minelle, a singer and accordion player with infectious energy; Robert Bober, once Truffaut’s assistant director and now a writer, photographer and filmmaker; Riton la Manivelle, a chanson singer and barrel organ player; Steven, a Scottish mural painter; and Lucio Urtubia, a Basque bricklayer and anarchist wanted by Interpol for forgery, who now runs the cultural centre Espace Louise Michel.

Le Vieux Belleville is an authentic throwback in time, outmoded and outdated. Deeply rooted in the French soul, its culture attracts curious people from all over the world – to sing songs by Fréhel, Piaf and Gainsbourg, to dance and to live the eternally modern idea of brotherhood. The chansons sung here are a distillation of life itself, an essence – they speak of revolutions, revolts, world wars, May 1968, love and passion.

Belleville belle et rebelle tells of a hidden France, illuminating a deep solidarity within this society. A film about civil courage, culture and political interference – belle et rebelle.

In Morcá, a small rural area in the middle of the Colombian Andes, Luis Orduz has dedicated his entire life to artisanal coal mining. His love and dedication to his family keep him holding on to the hustle in order to give them a better chance in life. He keeps debating between his long-awaited pension or keeping on working to provide for his family, while also facing the guilt around a great deal of damage caused to the environment. He has to make a decision in which the human instinct of survival, the love for his family and for his land create a flood of feelings that intertwine in a constant dilemma between hope and despair.

While millions of birds migrate freely in the skies above, Fadia, a Palestinian refugee stranded in Lebanon, yearns for the ancestral homeland she is denied. When a chance meeting introduces her to the director, Sarah, she challenges her to find an ancient mulberry tree that once grew next to her grandfather’s house in historic Palestine, a tree that stands witness to her family’s existence.

With only inherited memories, a blind man and a two-headed dragon as her guides, Sarah embarks on her quest to find the tree. Along the way, she learns that the region is also one of the world’s busiest superhighways for bird migration. And it is the observations of the ornithologists on the homing instincts of these millions of birds, that inadvertently reveal key elements of the Palestinian refugee situation.

Spanning fifteen years, this story of a friendship that stays connected across a divided land and a fragmented people adopts a birds’ eye perspective to reflect on freedom of movement, exile and the hope of return.