Immigration

World Premiere. Curry Scent is a fresh tale of a young immigrant family that comes to Florida in search of the American Dream. As they navigate the pitfalls of their new life abroad, doing menial jobs that many new immigrants find themselves forced to do, they still find humor and an overriding desire to succeed in their new life. The story focuses on Geetha, the young daughter and center of her eight-member family as she navigates the dating world in hopes of finding a suitable match to legitimize her visa. In her journey she encounters the forces it takes to understand what she loves about her country and at what price she is willing to forsake it. Told with uplifting humor and a variety of situations, from their cramped living quarters to her various excursions on which the entire family seems to participate, Curry Scent is a genuinely feel-good story about a serious topic that will resonate with people of all ages and backgrounds.

Florida Premiere. The Old Oak is the last pub standing in a once thriving mining village in northern England, a gathering space for a community that has fallen on hard times. There is growing anger, resentment, and a lack of hope among the residents, but the pub and its proprietor TJ are a fond presence to their customers. When a group of Syrian refugees moves into the floundering village, a decisive rift fueled by prejudices develops between the community and its newest inhabitants. The formation of an unexpected friendship between TJ and a young Syrian woman named Yara opens up new possibilities for the divided village in this deeply moving drama about loss, fear, and the difficulty of finding hope from master filmmaker Ken Loach, who at 87 announced this is his final film.

Florida Premiere. Urgent, clear-eyed, and helmed with incredible conviction, Green Border finds master filmmaker Agnieszka Holland training her camera on a real-life geopolitical crisis. Set on the border of Poland and Belarus, the film offers a glimpse into the lives of refugees fleeing to the European Union and the humanitarian activists working to help them reach safety. When a family of Syrian asylum seekers is left stranded in the forest, a group of Belarusian border guards shepherds them into Poland. When they encounter the Polish military, they’re forced back over into Belarus. Julia, a psychologist who lives alone near the border, witnesses this cyclical, inhumane back-and-forth and joins up with a group of activists working to rectify the situation. This harrowing, urgent drama constructs an intricate account of the contemporary global humanitarian crisis, expanding out to encompass the interconnected lives of security patrol officers, activist lawyers, and civilians who put themselves on the line for strangers. Director Agnieszka Holland reaffirms both her unyielding commitment to political filmmaking and the ability of immersive storytelling to illuminate the darkest corners of the world.

Florida Premiere. In 2015, three Muslim-American students were shot point-blank while eating dinner in their home in Chapel Hill, NC. In 36 Seconds: Portrait of a Hate Crime, filmmaker Tarek Albaba makes a moving, impassioned case for justice for these innocents and for their community. The film charts the victims’ families’ agonizing pivot from trauma to advocacy as they struggle to prevent their loved ones’ deaths from being dismissed as the result of a random parking dispute. They courageously speak the truth about the hate crime that has destroyed their lives, about the overt and insidious ways racism plays out in our society and about the need to reform a hate crime system that is broken. This is a story about grace and the will to fight for the truth in the worst of circumstances.

Florida Premiere. In her book Reversing the Gaze, Cameroon-born, Italian resident and noted author Geneviéve Makaping comments on the embedded racism of contemporary Italy, emphasizing the way in race, color, gender and class intersect and perpetuate inequalities. In Maka, Makaping talks of her life in Italy and her perilous migration journey which led to her becoming the first Black news editor in that country. Through her story Maka speaks out against the media representation of immigrants and offers an evocative examination of the intersection between sexism and racism in the western world while introducing us to the diverse community to which she belongs, a microcosm that is a model of a multicultural society, albeit with its contradictions and idiosyncrasies.

Introduced by Patrizia La Trecchia, USF Professor and Advisor

A talented Filipino American singer’s Vegas career stagnates as she feels increasingly distant from her daughter.

Far from her family, Rocio (a Colombian immigrant in NY) finds out her grandmother is severely ill.

This acerbic political satire is an emotionally incisive denouncement of white privilege, profiling, and Islamophobia.

Fault lines (cultural, relational, and geological) threaten a tenuously reunited Taiwanese American family in the late ’80s.

Filmmaker Jessica Wright imagines the sacrifices her great grandmother made for her family generations ago.

With unflinching humanity, this intimate documentary reveals the arduous and often uncertain process asylum-seekers go through.