Kamal resolves to change his life for the better, and so leaves Belgium to help victims of the war in Syria. But when he arrives, he is forced to join a militia and is left stranded in Raqqa. Back home, his younger brother Nassim quickly becomes easy prey for radical recruiters, who promise to reunite him with his brother. Their mother, Leila, fights to protect the only thing she has left: her youngest son.
Aboubakr BensaïhiKamal
Lubna AzabalLeila
Tara AbboudNoor
Amir El ArbiNassim
Younes BouabAbu Amar
Kamal MoummadIman Yusuf
Fouad HajjiIdrissNassim RachiAbdullah
Saïd BoumazougheIbrahimMalak SebarHind
When ISIS took their homes, families and city, one group of men fought to take it all back. Based on true events, this is the story of the Nineveh SWAT team, a renegade police unit who waged a guerrilla operation against ISIS in a desperate struggle to save their home city of Mosul.
A priceless tablet of Gilgamesh, the oldest and most important work of literature is stolen from a museum. A security guard vows to do whatever it takes to get it back from a group of smugglers. Along the way, he faces his own inner demons.
Bahar, the commanding officer of the Daughters of the Sun, a battalion made up entirely of Kurdish female soldiers, is on the cusp of liberating their town, which has been overrun by ISIS extremists.
A man is beaten to death in the Middle East. In Stockholm, a young woman disappears on her way home from work. These two events will prove to be related. Since Martin Beck has quit, Steinar Hovland leads the search for the missing girl. But Martin is drawn into the case when he decides to help the national Security Police investigate a suspected terrorist. They soon realize that they are in a race against time to stop a catastrophe.
Looking to investigate recruitment techniques of ISIS to lure women into Syria, a journalist creates a Facebook profile of a Muslim convert. When an ISIS recruiter contacts her online character, she experiences the process first hand.
Rojda, a native of Iraqi Kurdistan and a soldier in the German army, travels to a refugee camp in Greece where she manages to meet her mother, who has bad news about her sister Dilan.
After two marines make it home following an ISIS interrogation, one struggles to survive while the other fights his way back into the mixed martial arts world that he left behind years ago.
Paris, spring 2015. Faustine travels to Syria with her little son to join ISIS; but, once in Raqqa, she soon realizes the hell she is gotten herself into. Her husband Sylvain quickly understands that the French government is powerless to help him, so he plans with some friends a high-risk extraction operation to get his family back.
In a war-torn Middle Eastern city where music has been banned by Islamic extremists, Karim, a brilliant musician, struggles to rebuild his destroyed piano while trying to escape to Europe.
Elisabeth lives a quiet live in the Belgian countryside with her young adult daughter Elodie. After the divorce from her husband Elisabeth took care of her daughter on her own. When Elodie disappears over night and Elisabeth discovers that she travelled to Syria to join the Islamic State, she begins her journey to find her daughter.
Two stories separated by 1400 years. After losing his mother in the midst of a war-torn country, an Iraqi child learns the importance and power of patience by discovering the historical story of Lady Fatima and her suffering.
After the impressive Gulistan, Land of Roses (VdR 2016), the Kurdish filmmaker Zaynê Akyol returns with these conversations with imprisoned members of the Islamic State, alternating their words with aerial views of the countryside. An unexpected look at a far-reaching current political issue and a film whose subject matter and rhythm create an impressive cinematic object.
A group of Malayali nurses stranded in Iraq, must survive their capture by the extremists and reach out to the rescue team headed by the Indian government.
The Kurdish Iraqi poet and actor Zeravan Khalil travels with his dog through an Alpine gorge after fleeing from IS war and genocide. As he remembers the abomination, he writes a poem with the title “You drive me mad” in Kurmanji Kurdish. In his home country, Yazidic Kurds are forbidden to work in his profession. Then he eats his apple and wanders through Europe’s middle with more hope.
Maija is a young and ambitious journalist who wants to do something that no other journalist has dared. In order to conduct a groundbreaking research on Daesh, she pretends to be an Islamic convert and tries to join them.
Laith, a 22 year old male wakes up on his birthday in Mosul, Iraq, only to have problems with his boyfriend, Mohanad a 27 year old male. Mohanad believes that Laith is cheating on him with a girl and a fight erupts as Mohanad storms out of the apartment only to rush back as he sees ISIS have taken over the city and raid the apartment block.
The eight-year Iran-Iraq War was one of the most brutal conflicts to devastate the region in the 20th century. Zahed was 13 years old when he enrolled in the Iranian army. Najah was 18 when he was conscripted into the Iraqi army, and he fought against Zahed in the Battle of Khorramshahr. Fast forward 25 years, a chance encounter in Vancouver between these two former enemies turns into a deep and mutually supportive friendship. Expanded from the 2015 short film by the same name.
A unique interview with Tooba Gondal, the woman who groomed and lured scores of Western women to join ISIS. Using social media, she became a deadly matchmaker, recruiting a number of high-profile “jihadi brides” for ISIS militants in Syria: she allegedly helped organise the transporting of three British schoolgirls, including Shamima Begum, to Syria.
Filmmaker River Hagg travels to war-torn Syria, in hopes of documenting the war between the YPG and ISIS. He eventually finds himself in a volunteer unit, the only medics on the battlefield.
Documentary following a team of technicians in Italy as they reconstruct a number of historic Middle Eastern artifacts that were vandalized at the hands of Islamic State.