The American writer Henry David Thoreau once famously remarked that “most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” This sensitive documentary opens a window into the lives of three women in Finland – “good girls” who always strive to do their best, but who find themselves dejected.

This moving family saga is at the same time a powerful exposé of the symbiosis between big business and the military dictatorship during Argentina’s “Dirty War.” Luis Aredez was a doctor in Ledesma, home to Latin America’s largest sugar refinery.

The divided West Bank city of Hebron is a flashpoint in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Najwa, Nawal, and Siham – three Palestinian widows – live in a house literally on the dividing line between the Israeli and Palestinian controlled parts of the city.

In the early 1990s, Thailand was hailed as an economic miracle. Foreign investment poured into the country, lured by the promise of cheap labor and lack of unions. Women, who make up 90% of the Thai workforce in the toy and garment manufacturing industries, work in dangerous, sweatshop conditions for less than livable wages.

The astronomical rise of world population is a fact that underlies virtually all political, social, and economic policies in the developing world. Official family planning is seen by governments as the only solution to the problem.

A personal and poetic exploration of the place of women within traditional Islamic society and specifically the custom of arranged marriages and the continuing importance of bridal virginity. Sixteen years have passed since Moroccan filmmaker Fatima Jebli Ouazzani left her home for Holland to escape the constraints her culture and its traditions place on women.

When Canadian filmmaker Gerry Rogers is diagnosed with breast cancer, she decides (together with her partner, Peggy) to make a film chronicling her experiences and her feelings as she struggles to overcome the disease.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the eyes of Israeli and Palestinian women. When the first Intifada broke out in the early 1990s, Israeli filmmaker Michal Aviad set out with two other women, one Israeli, the other Palestinian, to discover how the occupation affects women on both sides.

In 1976 the military junta that had recently seized power in Argentina declared martial law and suspended the constitution. Argentina’s “Dirty War” had begun, a state-sponsored terror campaign in which over 30,000 people branded opponents of the regime would disappear.

Ciudad Juarez, just across the Mexican-US border from El Paso, Texas, has been lauded as a “city of the future.” In the wake of the NAFTA agreement, scores of multinational companies have established factories there, and the population grows rapidly as people migrate looking for work.

Soumicha, a widowed mother of three, is the only female cabby in the Algerian city of Sidi Bel Abbes. With a camera mounted in her cab, the film records her customers’ thoughts on being driven by a woman, and through these fragments an image of Algerian society and its contradictions appears.

Amira Hass, a reporter for the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, is the only Israeli journalist living and reporting from the Occupied Territories. As such, she is in the unique position of being able to experience the conflict from the Palestinian point of view.

French Cameroonian filmmaker Jean Marie Teno is at home in Cameroon for a vacation. A childhood friend, Alex, asks him to film his wedding. He reluctantly agrees, only to find out on the way to the ceremony that Alex already has a wife.