Keyword Dissident

The heroic story of a dictator who risks his life to ensure that democracy would never come to the country he so lovingly oppressed.

An account of the many tribulations that Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, known for his subversive art and political activism, endured between 2008 and 2011, from his rise to world fame via the Internet to his highly publicized arrest due to his frequent and daring confrontations with the Chinese authorities.

Igor, who manages a fancy hotel and is on the take, has to juggle several problems at once. He has a two-hour window to get his ill-got gain out of the hotel, he must misdirect and obstruct the inquiries of a Party auditor who suspects that all is not above board, and he must keep out of sight and out of trouble his interloping and troublesome young brother-in-law, who arrives unannounced with barrels of rotten herring.

An anti-western propaganda film about the influences of American visual and consumption culture on the rest of the world, as told from a North Korean perspective.

Iran 1979. The Islamic Revolution is shaking up the country. Dissident Omid, who lived for several years in the German Democratic Republic with his wife, chemical engineer Beate and their mutual daughter, hears the call from his homeland and returns to Teheran with high hopes and best intentions, bringing along his family.

In search of inspiration and new topics, the famous metropolitan writer Kim Yesenin goes to the province. Unexpectedly for himself, he discovers that here people live very differently than in the world familiar to him. By chance, he witnesses someone else's love drama - intellectual Sasha and dissident Andrei who is leaving for America. He is shocked by this complex conflict and fictitious problems, where there is no place for either melancholy or depression. In this situation, the hero decides to go to Moscow...

When the Chinese Communist Party backtracks on its promise of autonomy to Hong Kong, teenager Joshua Wong decides to save his city. Rallying thousands of kids to skip school and occupy the streets, Joshua becomes an unlikely leader in Hong Kong and one of China’s most notorious dissidents.

In 2019, the multi-awarded filmmaker Nahid Persson Sarvestani (My Stolen Revolution, Prostitution Behind the Veil) filmed the Iranian journalist based in France Roholla Zam, who exposed the Iranian regime money laundering. Months later, Rohollah was lured by moles to Iraq and kidnapped to Iran. After 14 months in prison, he was executed.

It’s the last dictatorship of Europe, caught in a Soviet time-warp, where the secret police is still called the KGB and the president rules by fear. Disappearances, political assassinations, waves of repression and mass arrests are all regular occurances. But while half of Belarus moves closer to Russia, the other half is trying to resist…

Half blind and half deaf, ostraziced Cuban writer Rafael Alcides tries to finish his unpublished novels to discover that after several decades, the home made ink from the typewriter he used to write them has faded. The Cuban revolution as a love story and eventual deception is seen through the eyes of a man who is living an inner exile.

Choosing the fate of a rock musician was similar to being a dissident. From the 60s, the Soviet Union tried to discourage and restrict the expansion of rock music by any means. They called it the “rotten fruit of degraded capitalism, demoralizing the minds of Soviet youth”. Despite that, rock music broke the wall – made a hole in the Iron Curtain – and gained the hearts and minds of tens of thousands of young people.Rock musicians were on the frontline of the rebellion against the Soviet regime. Despite censorship, they managed to deliver, in a hidden, roundabout way through lyrics and music, the spirit of nonconformity and freedom of choice to their audience. A film about Latvian and Soviet rock pioneers, their lives and destinies.