Spark Features

In 1990s Iraq, it's 'draw day', when schools select students for the honour of bringing items to their mandatory local celebrations of President Saddam Hussein's birthday. Nine-year-old Lamia lives in the historic marshes with her spirited grandmother, Bibi. Before school, Bibi teaches Lamia clever tricks to avoid being chosen for the baking duties. However, when Musa, the authoritative teacher, calls Lamia's name for the most challenging task–the birthday cake–she has no choice but to accept. Refusing could mean imprisonment or even death.

After wildfires take his ranch, a cowboy named Dusty winds up in a FEMA camp, finding community with others who lost homes, including his daughter and ex-wife.

In 2008, during the last month of summer before high school begins, an impressionable 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy learns what his family can't teach him: how to skate, how to flirt, and how to love your mom.

In a near-future Japanese city bracing for a devastating earthquake, a group of teenage friends navigate personal struggles and fractured bonds amid rising tension.

After eight-year-old Josephine accidentally witnesses a crime in Golden Gate Park, she begins to act out violently to protect herself. This emotional trauma leads to conflicts between her parents as they search for justice, and a way to feel safe again.

After he's kicked out of his Indiana high school, an American kid and his Lebanese mom wind up on a road trip across the West for the first time.

Journalist Shiori Ito embarks on a courageous investigation of her own sexual assault in an improbable attempt to prosecute her high-profile offender. Her quest becomes a landmark case in Japan, exposing the country's outdated judicial and societal systems.

Two unemployed friends have a fresh idea: they want to stage Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' in Grand Theft Auto. But even in a virtual world, reality intrudes in a wild and trippy film shot entirely inside the ultra-violent video game.

Newly released after being locked up in his teens, 30-year-old Ricky navigates the challenging realities of life post-incarceration, and the complexity of gaining independence for the first time as an adult.

Over the course of a single hectic day in New York City, three people from Feña's past are thrust back into his life: his foreign father, his straight ex-boyfriend, and his 13-year old half-sister. Having lost touch since transitioning from female to male, Feña must navigate the new dynamics of these old relationships while tackling the day-to-day challenges that come with living a life in-between.

Reeling from a failed marriage and in need of comfort and a new perspective, a middle aged man returns home to take care of his aging mother within the deceptively tranquil landscape of rural Montana.

In West Hollywood’s Russian district, Margarita lives out the American Dream: competing on a reality show. Will she slay, serve, or survive?

A filmmaker ventures into the archives of her photographer mother to construct a personal story of love, loss, and finding someone in the work they leave behind.

Follows a recently deceased young man struggling to undo his fate, as he watches the world—and his soulmate—spin on without him.

Azra is worlds apart from her conservative Muslim mother. When her father suddenly dies on a trip home to Pakistan, Azra finds herself on a Bollywood-inspired journey through memories, both real and imagined; from her mother’s youth in Karachi to her own coming- of-age in rural Canada.

Twelve-year-old Lil Ant struggles to connect with his father when he begins to see surreal, almost spectral visions of boys drifting around his neighborhood. Their presence reveals a link between father and son, laying bare the threads that bind family, legacy, and place.

After an abrupt layoff, Z embarks on a trip across the Midwestern United States in search of a friend who has seemingly disappeared off the grid. Traveling with her two closest friends, these three queer black femmes find their priorities tested as shapeshifting threats in each city expose (inter)personal and ideological fractures.

An endearingly nostalgic exploration of the defiant Vietnamese new wave music scene, as well as a vulnerable and personal look at the filmmaker and her community’s revisiting of their unexamined past.

A lonely prospector’s son discovers a shadowy creature that offers a tempting — but deadly — way out of his impoverished town.

When her boyfriend returns to Ukraine to care for his ailing father, 23-year-old Dakota must navigate the precarious anxiety of holding onto the past and forging her future in the midst of her South Brooklyn universe.