Movies: Bureaucracy

A young woman searching for her birth parents in order to fulfill her sense of identity joins with an organization that fights the bureaucracy keeping adoption records sealed....

A Good American tells the story of the best code-breaker the USA ever had and how he and a small team within NSA created a surveillance tool that could pick up any electronic signal on earth, filter it for targets and render results in real-time whil...

Giuseppe Di Noi, an Italian surveyor living in Switzerland, gets arrested at the border while going back to Italy with his family for a vacation. But can someone tell the man why?...

Deep within Buenos Aires's labyrinthine subway system, a train mysteriously disappears along with its 30 passengers. The subway officials are greatly troubled and call in topographer Daniel Pratt to help them find it. Unfortunately, the tunnels are s...

A satirical take on the mundane absurdities of life in modern-day Iran, these nine vignettes illuminate the lighter side of enduring under authoritarian rule. Whether choosing a name for a newborn, graduating from grade school, getting a driver’s lic...

Joseph K. awakes one morning, to find two strange men in his room, telling him he has been arrested. Joseph is not told what he is charged with, and despite being "arrested," is allowed to remain free and go to work. But despite the strange nature of...

A man is downtown and urgently needs to pee, but a vindictive voice on the phone holds the combination to his pants in this dark comedy of desperation....

A full-time carer plots a daring heist from the Houses of Parliament, in a bid to thwart devastating welfare reforms known as Independence Credit....

Ahmed heads to Tahrir compound to extract papers to move his son to another school. There he clashes with the administrative obstacles. He suddenly finds himself involved in carrying a weapon and taking hostages at the government building and becomes...

An adopted boy's parents are killed, and to keep him from returning to the state's custody, he and his grandfather run away....

WELFARE shows the nature and complexity of the welfare system in sequences illustrating the staggering diversity of problems that constitute welfare: housing, unemployment, divorce, medical and psychiatric problems, abandoned and abused children, and...

This romantic drama follows two policemen whose job is to investigate the lives of foreigners who have applied for Swiss citizenship. Among the applicants they must screen are a French psychiatrist and his wife, and a ballet dancer. The married coupl...

A young man attempts to fight the system in an entertaining account of bureaucracy amok and the tyranny of red tape. Restored by the Academy Film Archive and the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industrias Cinematográficos in 2019....

Reverse Cowgirl. Rusty Trombone. The Wheelbarrow. Go inside the government office responsible for creating sexual positions as one woman pitches the position she hopes will take the world by storm....

Pensioner Roli comes to Fareed's assistance when the Syrian refugee is faced with the burial of his Muslim wife. Together they stumble into a bewildering forest of Swiss bureaucracy to which Roli finds beautifully simple answer....

A copying error by a military scribe turns the Russian words "the lieutenants, however" into what looks like "lieutenant Kizhe". The Tsar reads the error, and wants to meet this (non-existent) lieutenant. The courtiers, eager to avoid the wrath of th...

Nikolai Gogol's The Inspector General is a satire play well-known around the world. In the period between the end of World War II and the 1960s, the play was adapted in Hong Kong cinema a total of six times. Director Huang Yu alone adapted it twice, ...

Mivtza Savta ("Operation Grandma") is a satirical Israeli comedy about three very different brothers trying to get around many obstacles to bury their grandmother on her kibbutz. The story takes place in Israel, in the fictional kibbutz "Asisim"....

Civil Service follows a single man in charge of "family services" through a typical workday as he denies requests for government assistance while being confronted by his psyche in the form of his dead mother....

An American couple's battle through bureaucracy to adopt a Romanian child....