For the past 30 years, millions of Afghans have fled war, misgovernment and poverty at home. Many have settled illegally in Iran and there married Iranian women, often despite broad cultural differences in a society that disapproves of such matches.

Director Mahvash Sheikholeslami interviews several Afghan-Irani couples who speak with candour about love and acceptance, personal and cultural identity, within the frame of a visually charged, compelling journey through contrasting landscapes.

In northern Albania, lives are defined by the vendetta. Fearful of revenge attacks, thousands of people dare not leave their homes. Death awaits them the moment they cross the threshold of their door.

Christian knows every crack and every bump on the wall in front of him. For twelve years, he has not left this room because his father murdered someone. His last hope is the German nun, Sister Christina Färber.

As a mediator, she is trying to achieve the near impossible- to get the two families, sworn enemies, to abandon their vendetta and seek reconciliation. "I have seen too many people lying on the ground with a bullet in their head," she says.

This is a film about families immersed in the culture of the vendetta, living - and dying – by the laws of honor. Only Sister Christina is struggling to overcome this violent ritual and the Kanun.

On his return from Africa, Dr Stanislaw Szczepaniak founded The Centre for Alternative Medicine in Kuleszowka near Warsaw, where he sees dozens of patients every day.

It’s a great place for everyone to socialise and for the doctor to follow his dream, "to pull Polish people out of the 16th Century", using his own highly individual methods...

Marcin Grabowicz will introduce his work and lead a short Q & A afterwards.

Sanctuary: Inside Stories is an educational DVD resource produced as part of the Sanctuary project, which aims to improve health and well-being in new communities in Scotland. The resource gives insight into and raised awareness of the impact of asylum on mental health.

The Sanctuary project is delivered by Positive Mental Attitudes , Mental Health Foundation, Scottish Refugee Council, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde Equality and Diversity Team, NHS Health Scotland, Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture and Compass, the specialist NHS mental health team working with asylum seekers and refugees.

The screening will be followed by a discussion with participants from the film and Sanctuary project partners.

They are Afghans, Iraqis, Kurds, Palestinians, Eritreans, Somalis, Sudanese... They fled war, massacres, insecurity, or extreme poverty. Six years after the closure of Sangatte, there are still just as many trying to reach Great Britain.

Unprotected from the elements, harassed by the police, deprived of everything- including their own identities, the signs of which they erase even from their bodies- they wander the streets of Calais surviving thanks only to the generosity of local volunteers who feed them.

Every year, some 30,000 people come to Canada to apply for refugee status. About 40-45% of those are eventually accepted. Seeking Refuge takes us into the lives of five claimants and their support networks.

Though Esly and her common-law husband managed to evade violent gangs in Honduras, they were stopped at the US-Canadian border. Since they could not prove they had been living together for more than a year, he was deported and eventually killed by the men who were threatening them in Honduras. Najia is a human rights activist from Kabul whose parents begged her to flee after two of her colleagues were assassinated. When the death threats spilled over to her father, she came to Canada. Leyla escaped serial rape and other violence at the hands of soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo but cannot produce the exact documents demanded by refugee board members. Fouad is a Palestinian from Lebanon who is running through his limited legal options after his claim is rejected, due in part to bad luck as his brother’s nearly identical claim had been accepted by a different board member. On the other end of the process is Kader, a blind man from Algeria who has been living under asylum at his Montreal church for over three years.

Together their stories provide a provocative look into this lengthy, frustratingly bureaucratic process, fraught with political landmines. For the government it has become, to an extent, a numbers game. For the people who come to Canada seeking refugee status, it is usually a matter of life and death.

From the outside, the Sighthill Estate in North Glasgow is better known for crime, drugs and poverty than for its sense of community. It is also one of the most ethnically diverse communities in Scotland due to the Government’s asylum seeker dispersal policy, which has seen more than 50 nationalities housed within the area.

Over its 40 year lifespan, the Sighthill Estate has battled high levels of unemployment, addiction and poverty but continued to give solace and home to its residents. Despite the estate slowly falling into disrepair, a recent study (The GoWell 10 year Health Study, March 2007) found that 70% of the community was happy with the area and only 4% actively supported plans to demolish the towerblocks...

Filmed over one year for Channel 4’s 3 Minute Wonders strand, THE ESTATE

presents an intimate and insightful portrait of this truly unique neighbourhood as it

prepares for, and witnesses, the demolition of towerblocks that thousands once called home. Dealing with issues of community, family, identity and diversity, THE ESTATE reveals extraordinary stories about the very meaning of ‘home’ from deep within the heart of a fated community...

Sean McAllister’s Hull’s Angel saw him return to his home city to examine the impact of an influx of 1,500 asylum seekers.

When he arrived in Hull, the asylum seekers told him about a local lady who was helping them- so McAllister found Tina, a 48-year-old former housewife who was in a relationship with a 24-year-old Iraqi.

A fairy tale about a hero of our time who would die for what he believes in, but doesn’t believe in anything anymore... A new documentary style featuring a ‘satirical-vérité narration’ and over 400 unique ‘satirical documentary shots’ filmed on a three-year, 50.000 km trip along Balkan side roads.

In the Israeli Negev desert lies the Bedouin village of El-Sayed. It has the largest percentage of deaf people in the world.

Still, no hearing aids can be seen because in El-Sayed deafness is not a handicap. Through the generations a unique sign language has evolved making it the most popular language in this rare society that accepts deafness as natural as life itself.

The village's tranquility is interrupted by Salim's decision to change his deaf son’s fate and make him a hearing person using the Cochlear Implant Operation.

Tino La Musica are a band based in Cape Town whose members are all refugees from the Congo. They have a regular regular weekly gig at a club and live and rehearse in a rundown block of flats. Suddenly they are evicted, a week before the nationwide xenophobic violence that is to scatter and displace approximately 30 000 refugees around the country. The double impact of these events causes the band to fall apart.

Ironically, the consequence for these particular refugees is to push people previously earning a living from music into the wider job market as a means to survive- where they compete more directly with native South Africans.

The film follows the story of Mohammed, the producer of the band, as he goes in search of the band members, hoping that they can reform and continue building a future together.

In Conakry (capital of Guinea), in the entrance hall of the People’s Palace, is an imposing mural of Fadouba Oularé. He is represented with his Djembe, his rifle, and surrounded by his people. He is the incarnation of the slogan sent out by the Sékou Touré government to mobilize the Guinean population: "The right man at the right place".

Fadouba Oularé’s music is formed by his environment and by the history of his country, and is considered both a vital ritual in all local celebrations and a fundamental element of the Guinean revolution. As complex as his music, Fadouba Oularé is first of all an artist, but also the head of a clan, a soldier, a thief hunter and a medicine man. Through this portrait of Fadouba Oularé’ and traditional Mandingue music, the history of a nation and the struggles encountered by its people are conveyed.

I In some of the poorest parts of Nigeria- where evangelical religious fervour is combined with a belief in sorcery and black magic- many thousands of children are being blamed for catastrophes, death and famine, and branded witches. Denounced as Satan made flesh by powerful pastors and prophetesses, these children are abandoned, tortured, starved and murdered- all in the name of Jesus Christ.

This Dispatches special follows the work of one Englishman, 29-year-old Gary Foxcroft, who has devoted his life to helping these desperate and vulnerable children. Gary’s charity, Stepping Stones Nigeria, raises funds to help Sam Itauma who, five years ago, rescued four children accused of witchcraft. He now struggles to care for over 150 in a makeshift shelter and school in the Niger Delta region called CRARN (Child Rights and Rehabilitation Network). Gary and Sam introduce Dispatches to some of the rescued children who have been through unimaginable horrors.

A verite snap-shot of life in South Africa capturing the rising tensions in the months preceding the outbreak of xenophobic violence in May 2008.

In a community put under severe pressure by poverty, lack of resources and frustration at corrupt officials, Danny Turken examines the complex motivations of a people who have nowhere else to turn in the face of a national government that seems to have forgotten they exist.

South Africa, 2008: Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave, a Mozambican national, is burnt to death by a xenophobic mob. The media dubs him "The Burning Man".

Nigerian filmmaker Adze Ugah tries to understand who Ernesto really was, what the events were that led to this atrocity, and how it could have happened in the post-Apartheid South Africa of the Rainbow Nation... A South Africa where countless people- like the perpetrators as much as the victim of this crime- still live in poverty.

This film seeks to give "The Burning Man" back the dignity of his own name.

John La Rose (1927-2006) was a poet, essayist, publisher, filmmaker and Director of the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books. A cultural and political activist since the 1940s, he was also a co-founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement in 1966 and New Beacon Books. This DVD includes documentation from a tribute evening for him held at Street Level Photoworks in November 2006, and features contributions from Linton Kwesi Johnson, Horace Ove, Jim Kelman, Tom Leonard, Raman Mundair, Alasdair Gray and Roxy Harris.

Session (Sugar Version) considers the mental health of an 18th century slave called Pero who lived and worked in Bristol for his master John Pinney. Pinney's house is now a museum but Pero's room is closed to the public and used to store furniture. In the film, we see the room being cleared to create a space for art therapy sessions between African Caribbean men and Marian Liebmann, a therapist with specialist skills in conflict resolution.

The men who appear in the film all participate in an advocacy and support service called Two Way Street in Bristol for Black and Minority Ethnic people with mental health issues. We watch them working with sugar to make sculptural forms which are then displayed in the house, animating the commodity that fuelled the slave trade in the Caribbean.

Document 7 in collaboration with Glasgow School of Art Kortney Ryan Ziegler is an experimental filmmaker and Ph.D. Candidate of African American studies at Northwestern University, whose research examines representations of kink and BDSM in queer performance and cinema. Ziegler’s work has screened in film festivals in the United States as well as England, Canada, Spain and The Netherlands. The lecture will present Zeigler’s journey as a filmmaker personally, professionally, and academically and discuss the process that leads up to the production of the artistic vision.

The Friday Event lecture series has been running since the early 1990s and is The Glasgow School of Art’s flagship public lecture programme. Comprising a series of approximately twelve lectures over the academic year, the lectures are given by major international figures within the contemporary art world. The speakers are internationally significant artists, historians, cultural theorists and others contributing to the discourse around contemporary art and culture.

Free, but tickets are limited, and can’t be booked: so get there early!

Despite her muscular dystrophy, German dancer and choreographer Gerda König has toured the world uniting able and disabled dancers in performances. She engages the dancers by confronting well known Kenyan taboos and inviting them to use the parts of their bodies which have given them the most grief. This documentary shot in Nairobi, Kenya is a heart-warming example of how dance can heal and how dancers can effect social change. It also provides an unusual insight into the Kenyan way of life and East African culture.

Dance House is delighted to welcome film-maker Gerhard Schick for a post film discussion.

Recently there have been massive, unprecedented rises across world markets in the value of Jade. It is now 40 times more valuable than gold.

This part observational, part impressionistic study of a day in the life of a Muslim Uighur community, illustrates their hopeful efforts to discover Jade in the harsh conditions of a dried-up river bed near a remote town on the old Silk Road in Western China.

The Film focuses on the so called ‘social cleansing’ in Colombia - the illegal murder of the homeless and prostitutes.

Though the majority of crimes brought before the judiciary in Bogotá are the kind of misdemeanors that follow from abject poverty, government officials have cracked down hard.

To sell pirated CDs, to steal a cellphone, or to simply sleep on the streets may garner a particular individual a multi-year prison sentence.

BAGATELA provides a portrait of Justice against the backdrop of petty crimes that occur on a daily basis in Bogotá... a city accustomed to both violence and inequality.

More than 60 % of the vegetables grown in the Kathmandu valley are supplied by the Nagadeshi people, who spend their lives working the soil. Only a very few of them employ contemporary technology and practices.

This is the story of one such Nepali farmer from the indigenous Newar community as he struggles to retain his traditional lifestyle amidst the challenges of modernity.

Living just 10 km from the Nepali capital Kathmandu, he is threatened by the growing encroachment of housing companies into fertile watershed land.

Films + panel discussion

From Kingsnorth in Kent, to Mainshill in Lanarkshire and now Hunterston in North Ayrshire, recent moves towards "new coal" are uniting environmental campaigners and local residents in a wave of community activism...

FILMS

(1) Fighting Goliath: Texas Coal Wars (2007, 34 mins)

Narrated by Robert Redford and produced by the Redford Center and Alpheus Media, The film introduces the unlikely partners — mayors, ranchers, CEOs, community groups, legislators, lawyers, faith groups, and citizens — that have come together to oppose the construction of 19 conventional coal-fired power plants that were slated to be built in Eastern and Central Texas and that were being fast-tracked by the Governor.

(2) Kingsnorth : a local issue going global (15 mins)

Narrated by Robert Newman and documenting the fight against the building of a coal-fired power sation in Kent.

+ (3) Mystery Shorts

PANEL DISCUSSION

Including members of CONCH : Communities Opposed to New Coal at Hunterston who will explain how Glasgow is just 30 miles down-wind of a possible new £2bn coal power station and give details of the growing community campaign that is mobilising to stop the coal station from being built.

www.camcorderguerillas.net

www.conchcampaign.org

Sable Island is a protected area 300 kilometres southeast of Halifax that people cannot visit without special permission from the Canadian Coast Guard. Roberto Dutesco has travelled to the island five times.

The Romanian-born photographer has worked for years as a fashion photographer in New York City for magazines such as Vogue, Maxim, GQ and Vanity Fair. But he also has another passion — the wild horses of Sable Island.

Halifax filmmaker Matt Trecartin chronicles Dutesco’s obsession in the short film Chasing Wild Horses.

Mikhail Morozov is a Russian patriot, a good Christian and a successful businessman. He owns Durakovo - the "Village of Fools" - 100 km southwest of Moscow. People come here from all over Russia to learn how to live and become ‘true’ Russians.

When they join the Village of Fools, the new residents abandon all their former rights and agree to obey Mikhail Morozov’s strict rules. "What we have here is a society that respects vertical power, this is what our country needs most of all," says Morozov, quoting his idol President Putin.

Filmmaker Nino Kirtadze attains unfettered access as political and religious leaders gather at the castle to meet with Morozov and dream of a glorious future where Russia is devoid of foreigners. Purposefully restrained, yet cunningly subversive, Durakovo: Village Of Fools provides a chilling glimpse of fascist ideology on the rise.

East Germany- the Deutsche Demokratische Republik- was a country of more than 16 million people. Twenty years ago the Berlin Wall came down, and a year later the DDR disappeared forever. Yet it lives on in "Ostalgie" (East-algia), tourist souvenirs and the memories of those who lived there or visited.

My DDR T-Shirt takes a look at life in East Germany and asks people from East and West: What was the DDR really like? What do the old communist symbls mean now, and how does it feel to see them sold as souvenirs? Was the fall of the Berlin Wall as good as it looked on TV, and was anything lost when the DDR was consigned to the history books?

Diversity Films present the latest crop of films from their brand new filmmaking programme which offers free filmmaking training, mentoring and access to filmmaking equipment in new and existing communities in Glasgow. The programme is a diverse mix of documentaries, short drama and music video made by new filmmakers aged 10 – 60+ and will be followed by a Q & A with the filmmakers themselves.

In the Israeli Negev desert lies the Bedouin village of El-Sayed. It has the largest percentage of deaf people in the world.

Still, no hearing aids can be seen because in El-Sayed deafness is not a handicap. Through the generations a unique sign language has evolved making it the most popular language in this rare society that accepts deafness as natural as life itself.

The village's tranquility is interrupted by Salim's decision to change his deaf son’s fate and make him a hearing person using the Cochlear Implant Operation.

In 1942, hundreds of Czech Jews are deported to Riga in Latvia. In an eerily empty, dilapidated, fenced-off and snowed-in part of town, they find pots on stoves, clothes on the floor, as if everyone left in a hurry. Then stones wrapped in paper are thrown over the wire by young men held in a cordoned-off section of the ghetto. The notes say: "You will all be killed, like our families. We are the last survivors."

Yet life continues. Some people are sent to the Salaspils camp, where only ruthless selfishness offers a slim chance of survival, but others cling together, steadfastly maintaining "normality" amidst the atrocities. Children go to school past bodies hanging from the gallows. Boys play football on the ghetto square/execution ground. Teenagers fall in love at clandestine parties, almost literally "dancing on graves"...

Edited from 270 hours of interviews shot in 20 countries over 10 years, the film dispels our notions of a "Holocaust documentary". Employing no commentary or contemporary footage, only a minimalist montage of interviews and never-seen materials drawn from a vast array of sources, these entirely personal points of view combine in a life-affirming picture of survival through luck, wisdom, ingenuity and sheer will, to form a depiction of the Holocaust "as we don’t know it".

Pituba: an elite neighbourhood in Salvador de Bahía, Brazil. On the seafront of the city, just before the famous Itapuá beach, stands the sport complex of the Clube Português with its swimming pools, tennis courts, and football pitch

But the condition of the premises is pitiful: dirty water fills the pools. Grass grows between the tiles. Everything is covered in boards and canvas. Nonetheless, this rundown space has been adapted to meet the needs of its current residents: 85 families that belong to the Salvador homeless movement (MSTS).

In what was once a luxury club for white people, we are made aware of the origins of the homeless movement, and of the rules they have developed to make living together possible. In the former social halls, Dadinha and Shirley, inseparable neighbours, have their own cosy place. Rosa, however, prefers the intimacy of the terrace for her and her children, although it can be wet in the rainy season... Even the toilets became a home for Sandra and Lifael, and for the solitary Edjauma Dias.

Lisa, an experienced doctor with a normal professional career, is drawn to the idea of providing hospice care for terminally ill patients. One day by chance she gets an urgent call to treat a case of terminal cancer among the homeless of Moscow’s Paveletskaya train station. When she arrives she doesn’t find an individual patient- but a whole parallel world of sick and needy homeless people who live there...

Wednesdays At The Station captures 7 months of Lisa’s encounters, setbacks and achievements as she tries to help people who live well beyond the margins of normal society.

In 2008, to mark the 60th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Nick Higgins of the University of Edinburgh and Noe Mendelle of the Edinburgh College of Art, gathered together some of the most talented filmmakers and visual artists in Scotland to create a unique multi-director feature length documentary. The resulting film, The New Ten Commandments, broke new ground by seeking to explore Scottish life and culture through the prism of Human Rights. Dr. Nick Higgins will talk through the genesis of this project and, using of clips from the film, will explain the role such a documentary can play in the creation of a human rights culture.

Piotr and Marek are two young Poles without work or qualifications who are convinced that leaving for England is the only way they can get rich. They are modest: opening a small bar at Victoria bus station will do for a start. Plans for a classy restaurant in London and a factory producing pharmaceutical packaging in Poland can wait until their first business is a success.

However, after arriving in London, it becomes clear that they have been conned by a labour agent and opportunities for decent work without English are as rare as friends willing to take them in. This zippy film, shot in a direct cinema style, documents the phenomenon of East European labour migration and its pitfalls.

President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is feared in the West, but loved by many in Iran. On his frequent visits to the countryside he is greeted like a rock star, and literally millions of people write to him: he has received 9 million such letters in his years in office.

The letters are typically requests for loans, jobs or money, and they are often desperate. The diversity of opnions expressed reveal a clear rural-urban divide- not just in differing views of the president himself, but also on the issues that matter most to these two groups of people.

Filmmaker Peter Lom followed President Ahmedinejad on three of his trips to the provinces.

Korea is a divided nation. The psychic scar shared by families divided during the Korean War in the 1950s is symbolized by the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) dividing communist North from capitalist South. Along this infamous border, filmmaker Min Sook Lee begins a revelatory, emotion-charged journey into Korea’s broken heart, exploring the rhetoric and realism of reunification through the extraordinary stories of ordinary people.

Lee joins one man’s quest to prove the tiger, a symbol of resilience in Korean mythology, still lives in the DMZ. But Lee delves deeper than symbols, asking the crucial question—how will the two Koreas be put back together? In the South, we meet elderly Koreans waiting for news of relatives and young defectors haunted by memories of escape. In the North, we visit an inter-Korean economic project and gain unprecedented access to a state-sanctioned family reunion.

An eloquent tale of longing and hope, Tiger Spirit is an unforgettable portrait of Korea at a crossroads.

Our Vivid Stories is an inspiring and moving collection of 9 short films made by young LGBT people during 3 months of intensive digital storytelling workshops.

Devised by filmmaker Dianne Barry with Julie Ballands, the project was a unique collaboration between OurStory Scotland and LGBT Youth Scotland for GoMA’s 2009 exhibition shOUT: LGBT human rights and contemporary art.

The storytellers’ films describe their experiences of coming out, homophobia, and the importance of friends, family and support networks.

Living Queer African is an ongoing multimedia (audio/picture) documentary project which focuses on young, gay Africans living in the diaspora. Homosexuality still isn’t widely accepted in African culture. The project is intended to highlight the ordinary life of young, gay Africans rather than their sexuality, to help viewers gain a better understanding of some of the struggles they face and to help create a debate on gay rights in Africa as a whole.

Le(s)banese is a one-of-a-kind documentary exploring the lives of lesbians in Lebanon. Who are they, where do they hang out, what do they wear, and most importantly, how do they negotiate their desires within a troubled nation like Lebanon? Opening a window to a hidden world, Le(s)banese introduces you to women who are savvy, sexy and confident about themselves.

Document 7 in collaboration with Glasgow School of Art Kortney Ryan Ziegler is an experimental filmmaker and Ph.D. Candidate of African American studies at Northwestern University, whose research examines representations of kink and BDSM in queer performance and cinema. Ziegler’s work has screened in film festivals in the United States as well as England, Canada, Spain and The Netherlands. The lecture will present Zeigler’s journey as a filmmaker personally, professionally, and academically and discuss the process that leads up to the production of the artistic vision.

The Friday Event lecture series has been running since the early 1990s and is The Glasgow School of Art’s flagship public lecture programme. Comprising a series of approximately twelve lectures over the academic year, the lectures are given by major international figures within the contemporary art world. The speakers are internationally significant artists, historians, cultural theorists and others contributing to the discourse around contemporary art and culture.

Free, but tickets are limited, and can’t be booked: so get there early!

An alternative feature-length documentary that explores the lives of six black transgender men living in the United States. Through the intimate stories of their lives as artists, students, husbands, fathers, lawyers, and teachers, the film offers viewers a complex and multi-faceted image of race, sexuality and trans identity.

Winner, Audience Choice Award, Best Documentary, Reelout Queer Film & Video Festival. Winner, Isaac Julien Experimental Award, Queer Black Cinema Film & Music Festival. Official Selection 2009: LA Fusion LGBT People of Colour Film Festival 2009, Seattle, Langston Hughes African American Film Festival, London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.

There will be a Q & A with the filmmaker afterwards.

Cocais is a poetic documentary film made with patients and employees of an asylum town in the interior of São Paulo province. This is the story of a town that reinvented itself through a movie, or the story of a movie invented by a town.

For many years, Olaf, Mona and Maria have each been suffering from severe depression. The illness has left them without any interest in life. Suffering from suicidal thoughts, they admit themselves to the psychiatric clinic of the Charité Berlin. They do not shy away from trying controversial treatments such as electroconvulsive therapy. Shadows follows their struggles over two years. A film about hope, the abysses of life, and the brutal cruelty of an illness.

A sanatorium in Tehran occupied by mentally disabled war veterans: one of them, "Mahmood", is under the impression that he has built a doomsday machine which can destroy the world by pressing a button...

Juan Meléndez - 6446 presents the story of a Puerto Rican migrant raised in New York City and accused of murder in the state of Florida. While claiming his innocence, Juan Meléndez was sentenced in five days and put on death row for 17 years, 8 months and 1 day. During his last appeal, an investigator working for Juan’s lawyer found in a box the original transcript of the confession of the real killer- a piece of evidence that the jury never examined. He was exonerated on January 3rd, 2002. Juan Meléndez was sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit. His personal drama serves as counterpoint to the legal, political and public policy issues around the application of the death penalty in the USA and Puerto Rico. Juan Meléndez - 6446 is a story about the power of will over a miscarriage of the justice system.

Today, more than 200,000 men, women and children are locked up in North Korea’s concentration camps. Systematic torture, starvation and murder is what faces the inmates. Few survive many years in the camps, but the population is kept stable by a steady influx of new individuals considered to be ‘class enemies’.

A few people have managed to flee the camps to a new life in South Korea. Some of them get together and decide to make an extraordinary and controversial musical about their experiences in the Yodok camp.

Despite death threats and many obstacles, the musical becomes a tour de force for this ensemble of refugees, and for them a possibility opens to talk about their experiences and inspire others to protest the existence of the camps.

Mrs Molky, a 73 year old Iranian woman, has been a widow for 14 years now. She lives alone in a humble house in the small town of Baragun. One day, Mrs Molky decides to travel to Isfahan to visit relatives she has not seen in over 20 years...

It is our home that greatly shapes our identities and is the backdrop of our most intimate memories.

Lower Left is a portrait of an old woman who lives in a little apartment on a housing estate in the Ruhr area of Germany. The estate was built in the 1960’s to provide workers in the coal and steel industry with adequate housing. Forty years later she is one of the oldest inhabitants left, everyone else having either died or moved away. Together with her two sons, she tells a story that dives deep into the socio-cultural history of post-war Germany.

A film about the relationship between urban architecture, memory and the experience of intimate places- what French philosopher Gaston Bachelard described as "the poetics of space". A colourful journey through a forgotten landscape...

With the recent attack in Lahore on the Sri Lankan cricket team, last year’s massive suicide bombing in Islamabad and assault on Mumbai, Pakistan’s radical Islamists are bringing violence to the major cities of Pakistan and beyond.

Award-winning Pakistani journalist Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy investigates how the Taliban are recruiting younger and younger fighters for this campaign. She meets a 14-year-old boy in her home city of Karachi who is desperate to become a suicide bomber, determined to travel anywhere there are lots of infidels and blow himself up. She joins the elite unit of the anti-terror police squad who warn that the Taliban are hiding out in the city’s sprawling slums and recruiting children from small madrassas in deprived neighbourhoods. And she interviews the Taliban commander responsible for child recruitment, Qari Abdullah. A child recruit himself, he reveals that children as young as five are now being used by the Taliban

Sharmeen is shocked by what this all means for her country: "This new generation, brutalised and radicalised by poverty, indoctrination and war, are Pakistan’s future."

A journey through a region which is always in the glare of the world’s media, yet one which few of us really know. What is the music that forms the backing track to this mythical place? Who are its most iconic musicians and how do they live? What do they think of the unique conditions in which they live and how is that reflected in their lyrics and their melodies?

From the neon and the billboards of Tel Aviv, to the poverty and desperation of the occupied territories of the West Bank and the vast concentration camp the Gaza strip has become, we will share Checkpoint Rock with very different musicians, going from town to town- and from checkpoint to checkpoint- in a journey that will change the way we see these people in conflict.

An insightful portrait of the everyday life of a Chinese border police station. Reinforced units try to fight crime, though the results are often confused or grotesque despite the diligence of the inexperienced young officers. A mentally ill man calls them out over a "corpse" he has found in his bed which turns out to be a crumpled duvet. Another man suspected of robbery cannot be made to answer questions, even under hard interrogation- he is probably dumb. Director Zhao Liang oversees these very human stories with a certain humour, but there is a chilly edge to his wit, as he shows how the social structure is affected by ominipresent police repression.

With So Much Wealth In the World, Why Is There So Much Poverty? Poverty is not an accident. 1492 marks the birth of modern times when the conquistadors violently extracted gold and other natural resources. Since then, our economic system has been financed by the poor by forcing them to give up their land and access to natural resources, then through unfair trade, debt repayment and unjust taxes on labour and consumption. This system was carefully built and maintained by the free market policies, resource monopolies and structural adjustment programs by the World Bank and the IMF.

The poor from the barrios of Latin America and the slums of Africa show us the consequences of this system on their lives while leading economists, experts, and politicians explain how 20% of the world’s population consumes more than 80% of the planet’s resources and what to do about it.

Garry Kasparov became famous as a world chess champion noted for an inventive style marked by sophisticated combinations. As an opposition democratic politician in the group Other Russia he takes the same approach. For that reason he is a thorn in the side of the governing powers headed by Vladimir Putin. This documentary by Masha Novikova captures campaigning and demonstrations before elections to the Duma in 2007. Kasparov and his team made up of young democrats and experienced dissidents visit 30 regions in order to hold discussions with local people and put across their demand for change in the country’s government.

The film reveals how the Kremlin systematically sabotages the activities of Kasparov and his party, The Other Russia. The daily routine is tough: they have little access to the media, they are beaten up during demonstrations, they are put in prison. The Putin Youth follow them everywhere and do no let an opportunity go by to accuse them of treason to the homeland. Or occasionally the Kremlin tries to bribe them.

How does the life of an opposition member feel in Russia? The people do not trust you, the regime persecutes you, your fellow politicians betray you. Nobody needs your so called revolution. Why would you burn in her holy fire?

In 1969 the video portapak arrived in Europe, and for the next 10 years, Hoppy Hopkins and Sue Hall used video, mostly black and white, in a variety of situations – on the street, as art and as television, at a time when non-broadcast video was a new, undeveloped creative medium. In 1979, through their company Fantasy Factory, they established the first independent U-matic edit suite for cheap access.

This informative talk by Hoppy Hopkins and Sue Hall will show excerpts of their early work demonstrating the social uses of video for community action and development.

Between 1970 and 2003, about 1600 local women claimed to have been raped by British soldiers stationed in Northern Kenya. Many were beaten and rejected by their husbands as having brought shame on their community.

In 1990, a few such women gathered and created Umoja, a village forbidden to men, which rapidly became a refuge for those in a similar plight. Since then, jealous men have frequently attacked Umoja and created many problems for Rebecca Lolosoli, its founder and matriarch.

A young Sri Lankan woman struggles to gain independence,

while holding her troublesome family together in post-tsunami Sri Lanka.

Mayomi lost her husband to the Tamil Tigers, and her mother and home to the Tsunami. She is now the only female member left in her family, and single-handedly cares forher disabled father, her alcoholic brother and his abandoned six-year old son.

She is also still homeless and knows that, in a country crippled by bureaucracy and corruption, this is unlikely to change. As Mayomi struggles to overcome these obstacles, her optimism and courage drive her forward in this moving and tender film.

Close to the Pakistani border in the northwest of India lies the sprawling city of Vadodara. Each week in the poor district of Kalyan Nagar, a group of women gather under a tree to hold their own court.

They put beating husbands and mean mother-in-laws in their place. They go in as a "heavy squad" to help a poor widow, thrown out of the house with her little daughter after the death of her husband, to regain her belongings.

For women for whose plight the conventional legal system, the police and the courts seem indifferent, they provide the protection of their own law. They are the "Women for Justice".

The window displays of the Tehran clothing shops catch the interest of passersby who stop and linger. Gradually, the onlookers meet the stares of the grotesquely mutilated mannequins- disturbing caricatures of the female figure.

The mannequins, redefined by the regime, have become a metaphor for Iranian Women’s veiled and covered bodies. In the 1980’s they disappeared from shop windows altogether, reappearing only after the war between Iran and Iraq. First the male mannequins reappeared, then the female- but "modified" by the manufacturers in order to minimize their feminine characteristics: like a warning call sent to Iranian women and to society, an absurd totem intended to perpetuate the established order.

My father documented himself abusing me throughout the first 16 years of my life. After his death I uncovered his collection; boxes of audiotape, super 8, and over 10,000 photographs.

I am the daughter as well as the filmmaker, presenting this evidence in what I am told is a subtle intellectual investigation that is grotesquely truthful and forthrightly condemning.

In Freedom Park, a squatter settlement in South Africa, a group of HIV-infected former sex-workers create a support network called Tapologo. They learn to be Home Based Carers for their community, transforming degradation into solidarity and squalor into hope

Kevin Dowling, a Catholic bishop involved with Tapologo, questions the official doctrine of the church regarding AIDS and sexuality in the African context.

A small kitchen alarm clock sets the time. She has exactly 10 minutes to finish a customer.

Through the reading of a witness declaration, 10 Min. narrates how a young Eastern European woman ends up against her will in the Brussels prostitution network.

"Let us bring to the attention of the presiding judge that we have ruled the working conditions of the prostitutes, investigated by our services throughout this inquiry, deserved to be revealed. They were particularly painful."

The video 10 Min was realized in the framework of the International Day against Traffic in Human Beings.

Shangri-La to hell in ten years: How did Nepal, a peaceful landlocked country, become home to the most dramatic Maoist insurgency in modern history? Returned: Child Soldiers of Nepal’s Maoist Army tells the personal story of Nepali boys and girls as they attempt to rebuild their lives after fighting in the Maoist People’s Liberation Army during the eleven-year civil war between the insurgents and the Hindu monarch of Nepal.

With the major conflict ended and the Maoists in control of the government, these children are now discarded by the Maoist leadership and forced to return home to communities and families that want nothing to do with them. For many of the them, the return home can be even more painful than the experience of war.

Through the voices of former child soldiers, the film examines why these children joined the Maoists and explores the prevention of future recruitment.

Screening of 3 short documentary films made by pupils from Jordanhill and Springburn Academies, organised by the Strathclyde University Applied Educational Research Centre as part of the Inspiring Enquiring Minds citizenship education programme.

Pupils are encouraged to engage with their local communities through the process of developing, shooting and editing short documentaries about community projects around Glasgow.

The screening will be followed by a workshop exploring the pupils’ experience of working with local projects in making documentaries and its relevance in an international context. This will be attended by pupils from both schools and other schools involved in the IEM programme.

Drumchapel: The Frustration Game’ is a damning indictment of local authority enterprise schemes which are contrived to look as if they are there to help the disenfranchised but in fact serve the purpose of greater social control. ###Made by De-Classed Elements in the late eighties, a video group who were based in Drumchapel, Glasgow, it is as relevant today as it was then.

A DVD drama project on the issues of racism and multiculturalism, featuring the young people from Barnados, Future Visions Youth Action Group, Govanhill Youth Project and Castlemilk Youth Complex.

This programme is in collaboration with Gara who will lead a Q&A after the film.

When Provanhall Housing Association needed to communicate their annual report to their members, they got in touch with their local youth group to help out. Now, there are annual reports and there are annual reports....

A little girl tries to understand why her autistic brother is not like other children.

Forgotten Voices – Thoughts, Feelings and Ideas, produced by the Fostering Network is a unique collaborative production from original material produced by young people between the ages of 8 and 24. The group of young people – representing children and young people in foster care, and the sons and daughters of foster carers, came together to share their experiences. The young people met and wanted to make others aware of the many complex and challenging issues they faced. They expressed themselves through writing stories, prose and poetry. Following the production of a booklet, they wanted to make a DVD. Due to legal restrictions preventing the use of any identifying photos or films of young people in foster care, the young people decided to use creative imagery instead. Working in a creative collaborative approach, with the Big Step Partnership and the Babygrand Production Company, this powerful DVD was produced. It has been used extensively throughout Scotland to train foster carers and social workers and to encourage young people to talk about their own experiences.

Document 7 will screen the following excerpts: Going Into Foster Care, Overnights, Bin Liners, Jessica’s Story, I Never Saw Her Again and Education.

Destination – A short animated film giving an insight into how unaccompanied asylum seeking children perceive Scotland and the good and bad experiences that they have. The DVD was called ‘Destination’ because Scotland was the destination where the young people found safety, but also to highlight that for some young people with negative asylum decisions, they do not know if this will be their final destination or whether they will need to return to their country of origin.

The animation was made by the ‘Young Survivors Steps to the Future’ group with the BBC L.A.B., involving young people from 9 different countries. The group celebrates it’s 5 birthday in October 2009. and is supported by the big step, Children’s Rights Service & Residential Services at Glasgow City Council and the Scottish Refugee Council.

Tall Storeys is a video project for young people under 21 years of age and presented as part of artist Lindsay Perth’s residency with multi-story, Street Level’s collaborative arts programme based in the Red Road housing estate, North Glasgow. These films premiering at Document 7 are the first productions from collaborations over Summer 2009 and part funded by The Red Road Project.

Double Trouble 5min
My Lessons With Super Zero, 4min
Olio, 2.30min
Room With A View, 2min
Teen Spirit, 8min
When I Close My Eyes, 3min

www.multi-story.org
www.redroadflats.org.uk
www.streetlevelphotoworks.org

As part of Amnesty’s new Demand Dignity campaign, launched this year, they commissioned the film Poverty of Justice. The screening will be introduced by Graeme McGregor (Amnesty International) and will be followed by a panel discussion.

Film: Poverty of Justice

Around the world, people living in poverty are increasingly fighting for recognition of their rights, challenging abuses of power and demanding a voice in the decisions that affect their lives. In the film Poverty of Justice, people from three different communities in Peru, Canada and Kenya, tell their own stories of this struggle for dignity and rights. Amnesty International has made a long-term commitment to working with these communities and this film has been produced as the first step in campaigning with them and as an educational resource for our members and activists.

Panel will include: Graeme McGregor (Scotland Campaigner Amnesty International), Elaine Webster (Centre for Human Rights Law, University of Strathclyde) and Jemma Neville (Scottish Human Rights Commission).

The journey of a young Indian woman’s hair, donated to the Temple to be then converted into exquisite hair extensions in Italy. This same hair will then return to India to satisfy the whim of a successful career woman in Bombay.

A story of the cult of beauty in the era of globalisation. An original view of today’s India with its contradictions- a kaleidoscope of modernity, economic expansion and ancient traditions.