Directed by Charles Chaplin • 1917 • United States

AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS features a screening of Charlie Chaplin’s 1917 film THE IMMIGRANT, which features Chaplin’s Little Tramp as an immigrant sailing for the United States. Director Louis Malle chose this film because “it was an evocation of fr...

Directed by Jean Renoir • 1935 • France

This multi-lingual drama from Jean Renoir follows Toni, an Italian immigrant who gets entangled in many relationships after moving to the south of France.

Directed by Ousmane Sembène • 1966 • Senegal
Starring M’Bissine Thérèse Diop

Ousmane Sembène was one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived, as well as the most renowned African director of the twentieth century—and yet his name still deserves to be better known in ...

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder • 1969 • Germany

The arrival of a Greek immigrant alters the lives of a group of friends in West Germany.

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder • 1974 • West Germany
Starring Brigitte Mira, El Hedi ben Salem, Barbara Valentin

The wildly prolific German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder paid homage to his cinematic hero Douglas Sirk with this update of that filmmaker’s 1955 ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS. A ...

Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1976 • United States

Following her time living in New York in the early 1970s, Chantal Akerman returned to the city to create one of her most elegantly minimalist and profoundly affecting meditations on dislocation and estrangement. Over a series of exactingly compo...

Directed by Robert M. Young • 1977 • United States
Starring Domingo Ambriz, Trinidad Silva, Linda Gillin

In ¡ALAMBRISTA!, a Mexican farmworker sneaks across the border to California to make money to send to his family back home. It is a story that happens every day, told here in an uncompromisin...

Directed by Louis Malle • 1986 • United States

In 1986, Louis Malle, himself a transplant to the United States, set out to investigate the ever-widening range of immigrant experience in America. Interviewing a variety of newcomers (from teachers to astronauts to doctors) in middle- and working-c...

Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz • 1995 • France
Starring Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé, Saïd Taghmaoui

Mathieu Kassovitz took the film world by storm with LA HAINE, a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically the low-in...

Directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne • 1996 • Belgium
Starring Jérémie Renier, Olivier Gourmet, Assita Ouédraogo

LA PROMESSE is the breakthrough feature from Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, who would go on to become a force in world filmmaking. The brothers brought the unerring eye fo...

Directed by Aki Kaurismäki • 2011 • Finland, France
Starring Blondin Miguel, André Wilms

In this warmhearted comic yarn from Aki Kaurismäki, fate throws the young African refugee Idrissa (Blondin Miguel) into the path of Marcel Marx (André Wilms), a kindly old bohemian who shines shoes for a liv...

Directed by Jacques Audiard • 2015 • France
Starring Antonythasan Jesuthasan, Kalieaswari Srinivasan, Claudine Vinasithamby

With this Palme d’Or–winning drama, which deftly combines seemingly disparate genres, French filmmaker Jacques Audiard cemented his status as a titan of contemporary world ...