Babak Jalali

Palestinian-Syrian teenager Nasser and his older brother Yassin have been living in a Greek refugee camp, awaiting a decision on their asylum application. They pass the time recording comedy sketches, fantasizing of making zombie films and moving to Sweden. Nasser, however, feels increasingly trapped in this no-man’s-land. With nowhere to escape, Boiling tensions in the camp push Nasser to another world.

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Donya, a lonely Afghan refugee and former translator, spends her twenties drifting through a meager existence in Fremont, California. Shuttling between her job writing fortunes for a fortune cookie factory and sessions with her eccentric therapist, Donya suffers from insomnia and survivor's guilt over those still left behind in Kabul as she desperately searches for love.

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Three lonely people, each looking for love in their own ways. This is hard enough in any big city – never mind in Tehran, where individual freedoms can’t be taken for granted. In a sexy voice on the telephone, an overweight receptionist seduces men who wouldn’t look twice at her real ‘me’. A former bodybuilding champion now earns a living as a personal trainer. When he develops feelings for a promising young sportsman as a client; he drops everything else; even a very promising acting job for a well-known French director. A singer at religious funerals is dumped by his fiancée. He tries to find new purpose in life by retraining as a singer at weddings and parties. That’s a lot more attractive to women, his friend assures him.

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The Yellow Eagle family are Native American and live on the Prairie Wolf Indian Reservation. News reaches them that Floyd, the youngest son of the family, has died during military service in Afghanistan. The waiting begins to get his body back to the Reservation to be buried.

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A brilliant and misunderstood Iranian writer struggles to pursue his ambitious goal of bringing together Metallica and Kabul Dreams, Afghanistan's first rock band.

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Ever since he was a child, the seventeen-years-old Edoardo has suffered from a malformation of the foreskin that stops him from masturbating and makes him insecure and ill at ease with girls. Shut up in his sexless microcosm, Edoardo reacts with irritation to the pressures of the outside world, which do nothing but exacerbate his insecurity. Forced against his will to emerge from the shadows in which he has hidden for years, Edoardo will initially try to solve his problem by clumsy stratagems before finding, at last, the courage to face his own fears.

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On Iran's northern frontier with Turkmenistan, the land of "heartbreak and tractors", director Babak Jalali mines absurdist humour and quiet pathos from the immutable routines of a stranded group of men.

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The unexpected arrival of Uncle Baccio in the country house where his son Corso is spending his holidays with some friends has uncontrollable consequences.

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Heydar is working in Tehran but is learning English so that he can return to his home country, Afghanistan, as a translator.

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Leon, an Irishman in his 70s, lives in a council block flat in the metropolitan area of Merseyside - his wife died recently, and his daughter Anna moved to Canada. His closest companion is his old colleague and best friend Saleh, of similar age who also lives alone on the same floor of the building. Leon and Saleh have been thick as thieves for years; still Leon finds it hard to talk to him about the recent plea his daughter Anna has made for him to join her and her family across the pond and start a new life in Nova Scotia.

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