Visa for the Ocean

An honest, hard-working schoolteacher in a small Bulgarian town is driven to desperate measures to avoid financial ruin.

More interested in partying and flirting with young musicians than work, veteran rock journalist Ellie Klug has one last chance to prove her value to her magazine’s editor: a no-stone-unturned search to discover what really happened to long lost rock god, Matt Smith, who also happens to be her ex-boyfriend. Teaming up with an eccentric amateur documentary filmmaker, Ellie hits the road in search of answers.

A poor, struggling South Carolinian mother and daughter face painful choices with their resolve and pride. Bone, the eldest daughter, and Anney her tired mother, grow both closer and farther apart: Anney sees Glen as her last chance.

A drama set in the American South, where a precocious, troubled girl finds a safe haven in the music and movement of Elvis Presley.

The true story of Captain Richard Phillips and the 2009 hijacking by Somali pirates of the US-flagged MV Maersk Alabama, the first American cargo ship to be hijacked in two hundred years.

When the tenacious young sailor Jessica Watson sets out to be the youngest person to sail solo, nonstop and unassisted around the world, many expect her to fail. With the support of her sailing coach and mentor Ben Bryant and her parents, Jessica is determined to accomplish what was thought to be impossible, navigating some of the world’s most challenging stretches of ocean over the course of 210 days.

In a suburban landscape, the lives of several families interlace with loss, despair and personal crisis. Esther Gold has lost focus on all but caring for her comatose son, Paul, and neglects her daughter and husband. Lawyer Jim Train is devoted to his career, not his family. Helen Christianson wants to find a new spark in life, while Annette Jennings tries to rebuild hers.

When their ocean liner capsizes, a group of passengers struggle to survive and escape.

Years after her son's suicide, a woman longs to confront both the past and a friend of his who took his business idea.

Thomas Montgomery, a married father of two young daughters, gets seduced by the world of online gambling and chat rooms where a virtual romance and sexual obsession ultimately leads to the murder of an innocent man.

During the 1976 Soweto uprising, a white school teacher's life and values are threatened when he asks questions about the death of a young black boy who died in police custody.

After being discredited as a coward, a 19th century seaman lives for only one purpose: to redeem himself. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2000.

Young teen girl Xiu Xiu is sent away to a remote corner of the Sichuan steppes for manual labor in 1975 (sending young people to there was a part of Cultural Revolution in China). A year later, she agrees to go to even more remote spot with a Tibetan saddle tramp Lao Jin to learn horse herding.

In order to be reinstated to the bar and recover custody of her daughter, a hotshot lawyer, now in recovery and on probation, must take on the appeal of a woman wrongfully convicted of murder.

When lapsed Jew and former cardiologist Harry suddenly decides to spend his retirement as a pig farmer in Nazareth, Israel, the move deeply shocks his family and his new neighbours. Back in New York, Harry’s ex-wife Monica is trying to manage the lives of their adult children, Annabelle and David, as well as her own.

Four siblings' lives change drastically when their ailing mother takes a turn for the worse over the holiday season.

Prerna, a teenager growing up in rural India, comes of age when she’s introduced to the sport of skateboarding. As a result, she has to fight the odds to follow her dreams and compete in the national championship.

94-year-old Eleanor Morgenstein tries to rebuild her life after the death of her best friend. As a result, she moves back to New York City after living in Florida for decades.

The story of a young writer's transformation when her past invades her present.

The true story of 20-year-old Colleen Stan, a hitchhiking woman abducted by a young couple and held captive for seven years, during which time she's tortured and forced to live as a slave to her captors.

Kim has had enough: of school, of her girlfriend, and even more so of her mother. Because of her, Kim's father is now gone. Just gone. So Kim decides to leave. She can't go back, only forward. Until she finally arrives at the one place where she can still be.

Co-directed by Blackwood and Julien, the first full-length feature film by Sankofa Film and Video offers a radical and necessary interrogation into what constitutes 'post-colonial' identity at a time of political and social restlessness in Britain. Set within an isolated desert landscape contrasted with recognizable scenes of the intensity of family life, this vanguard work demonstrates the richness and variety of the black experience; it is a poetic and hard-hitting commentary on the complexities of race, gender and sexuality.

Two actresses take us through a series of 'raps' and sketches about what it means to be beautiful and black.

For many years, market woman Addi has been helplessly exposed to the ever-increasing aggression of her husband Max. His physical and emotional abuse has become part of her everyday life, from which she cannot find a way out. Due to her economic dependence on Max and the passivity of those around her, every attempt to escape leads her back to her husband. When Addi accidentally learns of the existence of a women's shelter, this is her long-awaited escape from violence and she flees to the facility with her son. Strengthened by the solidarity among the women, she founds a shared flat with others in order to regain her long-suppressed freedom. Director Cristina Perincioli had the story developed and acted out by residents of Germany's first women's shelter in West Berlin.

During a long, hot summer on the Thamesmead Estate in Southeast London, three teenagers edge towards adulthood.

A New York City writing professor, Frannie Avery, has an affair with a police detective who is investigating the murder of a beautiful young woman in her neighborhood.

Founding a social Muay Thai project in the North Zone of Rio de Janeiro, Mestre BG and his competitors face the adversities of an underfunded project and fight to win their place on the podium. The challenges intensify when one of the students, Raíssa Pacheco, secures a spot to compete in a South American championship in Uruguay.

Musician Max Tooney goes to sell his prized Conn trumpet to a music shop, where he plays the instrument one last time. The shopkeeper recognises the song as one on a record matrix he found and asks who the piece is by. Tooney tells the story of an infant found abandoned in the first class dining room of the four-stacker ocean-liner SS Virginian on 1 January 1900. Danny Boodman, a coal-man from the boiler room, names the boy Danny Boodman T. D. Lemon 1900, after himself, the fruit crate the boy was found in, and the year, and raises him as his own.

Three sisters - Georgia, Eve, and Maddy - do what they do best with life, love, and lunacy on the telephone lines that bind - when their curmudgeonly father, Lou, is admitted to a Los Angeles Hospital. After years of wild living, intermittent affection, and constant phoning, he is finally threatening to die.

A troubled Southern man talks to his suicidal sister's psychiatrist about their family history and falls in love with her (and New York City) in the process.

A financially strapped mother joins a Mohawk woman to smuggle illegal immigrants into the United States.

Four young women continue the journey toward adulthood that began with "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants." Now three years later, these lifelong friends embark on separate paths for their first year of college and the summer beyond, but remain in touch by sharing their experiences with each other.

Sam, a neurodivergent man, has a daughter with a homeless woman who abandons them when they leave the hospital, leaving Sam to raise Lucy on his own. But as Lucy grows up, Sam's limitations as a parent start to become a problem and the authorities take her away. Sam convinces high-priced lawyer Rita to take his case pro bono and in turn teaches her the value of love and family.

An empty, undefined world. Gabriela (70) is seriously ill. By all means she tries to keep alive, to escape from her own death. In her suppressed and rising fear of death she refuses any moral argument. Gabriela becomes an animal.

The loving and nurturing Mariel marries Edward after his first wife abandons him and their three children. Mariel strives to win the acceptance and affection of her new stepchildren, even as she tries to define her role in the family.

Meredith Baxter plays Joyce Wadler in this heartwarming story of hope, courage and redemption inspired by the New York City journalist's real-life struggle with breast cancer. Stuck in a lackluster relationship with her boyfriend, she's forced to re-examine her life when she receives the troubling diagnosis.

A female teenager witnesses a murder in a desolate high density housing area on the outskirts of Berlin and is henceforth in danger.

"Taking its title from John Keats’s early 19th-century poem, this highly personal melodrama finds Dulac interrogating the archetype of the femme fatale. La belle dame sans merci follows a famous actress who was once seduced and abandoned by a rich man and subsequently resolved to become a “merciless woman,” forever scheming to hurt others (men in particular) in a ruthless yet captivating manner. Dulac challenges the Romantic archetype embodied in Keats’s poem by way of symbolist mise en scène, self-reflexive narration, and her typically associative approach to editing, locating a modern ambiguity within the stereotypical figures of 19th-century art." - Film Society of Lincoln Center

Agnes is not satisfied with her life. She wants a change, but her relationship with her single parent father and dominant girlfriend inhibit her to do something about it. When the father introduces his new wife, Annalyn, everything changes. The same-aged Filipino stepmother helps Agnes see a new path. Soon emerges something that no one could have foreseen.