Movies: Trauma

A young African boy with a haunting back story starts school in Ireland, and finds out quickly exactly what it means to be the new kid. Winner of Best Narrative Short at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival and nominated for an Oscar....

In 2002, Jason Padgett was the victim of a vicious beating outside a karaoke bar in Tacoma, Washington. Upon regaining consciousness, Padgett’s sight was forever altered by a condition called acquired savant syndrome. The brain trauma opened his eyes...

Set in the pastoral mountains of northern Iran, eight-year-old Sahand has been rendered mute by the loss of his mother during the war. He is taken care of by his older sister as he struggles to process his trauma....

One in five Americans are diagnosed with mental illness every year. Suicide is the second most common cause of death in the US for youth aged 15-24, and kills over 800,000 people globally per year. Drug overdose kills 81,000 in the US annually. The a...

Paula Tobias, a Holocaust survivor who has suffered the ultimate personal tragedy of losing her spouse and children during the Nazi occupation of World War II. Now re-married and living in America during the late 1960's with husband David, they build...

Renee wakes up one morning in the middle of the desert with blood on her hands. She cannot remember why she is there, how she got there or with whom she came. Her quest to uncover forgotten events leads her on a journey of discovery where reality and...

After some personal trauma, Wilson Walmsley is invited to work as a substitute teacher in a suburban public high school. He finds lack of authority and interest in the school direction and teacher body; uncontrolled and abusive students in an environ...

At a secret monastery located in a rural area of Thailand, a music teacher is trying to help a young nun to be able to speak again. The nun's passion and sexuality clashing with her religious convictions have caused her to shut down....

Louka, whose parents were killed in the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, persuades a beautiful smuggler to take him over the border to visit his village, where a magical experience awaits them....

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A generational trauma through the lens of an Asian American teenager through food and poetry....

As queer trans and gender non-conforming children of the Vietnamese diaspora, we are fragmented at the crossroads of being displaced from not only a sense of belonging to our ancestral land, but also our own bodies which are conditioned by society to...

OBAIDA, a short film by Matthew Cassel, explores a Palestinian child’s experience of Israeli military arrest. Each year, some 700 Palestinian children undergo military detention in a system where ill-treatment is widespread and institutionalized. Fo...

As World War Two draws to a close, a sailor aboard ship in the Indian Ocean must do his duty. Watch must be kept, the horizon scanned for enemy craft and the bubble trails of deadly torpedoes fired from stealthy submarines. Haunted and scarred by con...

When a young woman returns to Wyoming to bury her mother, she reunites with her childhood friend, a hard-living rodeo princess, who forces her to confront a shared trauma from their past....

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Based on writer Maya Angelou's eloquent reminiscences of her days as a gifted youngster growing up in the South during the Depression years where she and her older brother were raised by their grandmother after the divorce of their parents....

The brutal murder on her parents leaves daughter and only witness, Finn, injured and traumatised. The police places her at the remote house of trauma psychologist, Dr. Sam Graham. As Finn begins to recover, the cleaner who had first discovered the mu...

Jamie and Elise both try to cope with the traumatic loss of Danny. For the both of them, reality and fantasy is a very fine line. They aren’t just grieving the person who is no longer physically with them, but also mourn the pieces of themselves and ...

A bodybuilding fever dream fueled by childhood trauma, food porn and acid techno music....