30th anniversaire of FIDMarseille

An aging movie actor who is preparing to shoot a death scene finds himself visited by the spirit of a dead, long-ago lover.

2006 film

A Letter from Hiroshima explores themes of apology and remembrance. Suwa sends a letter to a Korean actress (Kim Ho-jung) he has worked with in the past requesting her assistance to write and direct a film about Hiroshima. Ho-jung arrives at her hotel and is told to explore the city and wait for Suwa. Initially confused, Ho-Jung soon finds the city mesmerizing and spends days learning about the tragic bombing and the effects that are still felt in the city today. With sparse dialogue and just a handful of characters, Suwa uses black and white images of Hiroshima to convey the scope of the tragedy. In one particularly poignant moment, the voice of a mother is heard lamenting the fact that she had scolded her daughter the day of the bombing. We next see Ho-jung crying in her hotel room, ignoring the ringing phone.

Hanasareru Gang actually encapsulates three titles in one, for when written without Kanji characters, it can describe a gang that is “on everyone’s lips”, “flowery” or “separated from one other”. The film plays with these different meanings to tell the not strictly chronological story of a fun-loving young woman who joins up with a pair of petty criminals. After they steal a car containing a suitcase full of bank notes, they must go their separate ways. When the characters comment on the action in voiceover, ask how much more time the film is going to give them, quote from “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” or suddenly jump back and forth between tragedy and slapstick in tune with the music, one might think that Pierrot le fou got lost and ended up in Japan.

A woman is waiting for a man. She deceives the man with her long hair hidden in a wig and jokes that she would go to Hiroshima.

When Yuki finds out that her parents are separating and she is moving to Japan with her mother, she and her best friend Nina devise ways to reunite the feuding adults.

Tetsuro is living with his young girlfriend Aki in a pleasant house in Tokyo. They both spend a lot of time at their jobs. However their routine is upset when Tetsuro brings his 8 year old son Shun to live with them, while his ex-wife recovers from a car accident. Aki is annoyed because she was not asked, and she knows that she will have to do the bulk of the work in caring for him. This forces Aki to reevaluate her relationship, and decide whether she is to remain a modern working woman, or become a mother.

Olivier Assayas, Gus Van Sant, Wes Craven and Alfonso Cuaron are among the 20 distinguished directors who contribute to this collection of 18 stories, each exploring a different aspect of Parisian life. The colourful characters in this drama include a pair of mimes, a husband trying to chose between his wife and his lover, and a married man who turns to a prostitute for advice.

A French couple has been living in Lisbon for years, and they return to Paris for a friend's wedding. They announce to another friend they are having dinner with that they are going to split.

First of a triptych of shorts using, reusing, misusing unused and behind-the-scenes footage from Félicité.

Four filmmakers share a montage of their original ghost images and rushes on a mix of I've seen the future.

An American babysitter comes to look after a young French teenager in her parents' chalet in the French Alps. Teenage sexual awakening fantasy.

Short lo-fi film set in Senegal. Mostly focussing on a group of Senegalese youths, discussing their hopes and fears concerning the crossing of the atlantic to get to Europe. Will life be easier there or not?

Film following a Vietnamese director's wanderings through Marseille after her lead actor goes missing. Karaoke, beach sunrises and diaspora reminiscences.

She used to say: “Naku Penda Piya - Naku Taka Piya – Mpenziwe” in the opening of Michael Jackson’s song Liberian Girl. Words can be mentally repeated, he would say: “I love you so much – I want you so much – My love.” With the green background, the slow chords on his electronic keyboard, the stiff strikes of musician Wilbert Gavin of the Cities Aviv band, this dancer radiates intense energy.

In Olympus, the French and senegalese director Mati Diop captures the youth of Paris on the night of a heat wave, through the eyes and movements of her brother, the model Gard Diop. A dreamy trap score soundtracks the film, turning an ordinary night into a moment suspended in time.

Christopher Columbus discovered America while looking for India. Columbus' journeys are subjective and undefined. Illusions take over objective observation. When one leaves, it is always his/ her own dreams that take off first. The edge of the world is definitely more narrow than the idea of it.

Along the Atlantic coast, a soon-to-be-inaugurated futuristic tower looms over a suburb of Dakar. Ada, 17, is in love with Souleiman, a young construction worker. But she has been promised to another man. One night, Souleiman and his co-workers leave the country by sea, in hope of a better future. Several days later, a fire ruins Ada’s wedding and a mysterious fever starts to spread. Little does Ada know that Souleiman has returned.

Algiers. From the port to the souks, passing through the Jardin d'Essai, Dominique Cabrera transports us to the land where she was born, on the other side of the Mediterranean "where the sea is saltier". If most of the pieds-noirs left Algeria in the summer of 1962, some -a minority- remained. By going to meet them, the director makes her own inner journey.

A woman, scared by motherhood and her new born baby, runs away from her home and family to find a shelter at her upstairs neighbour's place.

This film deals with the aftermath of the Algerian war of liberation. Georges Montero, an Algerian-born Frenchman, manages an olive canning factory in Oran. He travels to Paris for a cataract operation. Marinette, his sister, and Belka, his friend and a recent immigrant, want him to return to France permanently. Friction develops between the two friends as Georges is pressured to sell his factory. Friendship developed between Georges and his surgeon, who as a French Arab has severed ties with his culture and country of origin.

French filmmaker Dominique Cabrera made this documentary diary by videotaping for nine months during 1995, probing her own life as a single mother in a Paris suburb and capturing her depression, therapist, lover, and intake of food and Prozac

Single mother Nadia is surviving on welfare while transport strikes are paralyzing France in December 1995. While watching the news, she recognizes the father of her child among the strikers and decides to go and search for him. But she has nowhere to go. The film, shot almost entirely at night, carries documentary qualities, part of which is due to the appearances of actual railroad workers in several group scenes.

Ten years ago, my brother Bernard got married for the second time. We all went to the wedding in Boston, where he lives. It felt as if we were four little children again with our mom and dad. I had brought along a small camera, which I began to use to film our family. I've continued to this day...

A young woman struggles to overcome lost love, unplanned motherhood and ghostly apparitions.

Nana is 4 years old and lives in a stone house beyond the forest. Back from school, a late afternoon, all she finds is silence in the house. A journey into the darkness of her childhood. The world from her height.

Short film commissioned by the Cinemathèque Suisse to celebrate Jean-Marie Straub’s 85th birthday. Directed by Valérie Massadian.

An old thunderstorm rumbles in my head. A thunderstorm born 25 years ago. A storm at times distant, almost forgotten. A thunderstorm often deafening. Literature assured me men existed for a long time. Music taught me their melancholy preceded them. Painting whispered to me that screams can be silent. The trade of men, very fast, seemed to me vague and vain.

Ire. Feminine noun: wrath, rage, fury, indignation. Ire is the protest of women against those who oppress, despise and kill. Their eyes, tightly framed, stare at the camera: their stare is compelling. They are the masses and, from the anaphoric statement “I am”, sing out the violence suffered by women. In this film shot in four languages, Valérie Massadian uses the weight of her words and the strength of gate to build a babel call to resistance. Among these striking gazes, are the luminous eyes of a woman carrying in her womb a female child, yet to be born, but already angry. (Louise Martin-Papasian & Claire Lasolle – FID 2021)

The rules were: one day, one wheel, one shot (no editing). Valérie Massadian’s hypnotic short was made for Seattle’s Northwest Film Forum.

A man is wrongly jailed for murder while the real killer roams free. The murderer is an intellectual frustrated with his country’s never-ending cycle of betrayal and apathy. The convict is a simple man who finds life in prison more tolerable, when something mysterious and strange starts happening to him.

Erwin Romulo, the late Alexis Tioseco’s best friend, recalls the events after the critic and his girlfriend’s untimely death in their home in Quezon City. Diaz makes use of one long take to allow Romulo an uninterrupted narration of the events. The pain of recalling is palpable.

A wandering peddler separates from his fellow salesman and becomes involved with criminals in the jungle.

A terribly cool, hip youth film that throws awareness to the winds of MTV rock and roll, and post Generation- X teenage wasteland fantasies.

Deliberately structured and less beholden to its narrative, the film is told in three parts, with each part pertaining to each of the three visits of the time-travelling visitor from when the country was fighting for independence from Spain.

Hong Sang-Soo’s Lost in the Mountains (South Korea, 32min) the visitor is the supremely self-centred Mi-Sook, who drives to Jeonju on impulse to see her classmate Jin-Young – only to discover that her friend is having an affair with their married professor, who Mi-Sook once dated herself. The level of social embarrassment goes off the scale. In Naomi Kawase’s Koma (Japan, 34min), Kang Jun-Il travels to a village in rural Japan to honour his grandfather’s dying wish by returning a Buddhist scroll to its ancestral home. Amid ancient superstitions, a new relationship forms. And in Lav Diaz’ Butterflies Have No Memories (Philippines, 42min) ‘homecoming queen’ Carol returns to the economically depressed former mining town she came from – and becomes the target of an absurd kidnapping plot hatched by resentful locals. Serving as his own writer, cameraman and editor, Diaz casts the film entirely from members of his crew and delivers a well-seasoned mix of social realism and fantasy. —bfi

The boy has something to do in his life, he trains himself and makes plans. Then there is a knock on the door and something pulls away and he literally stays in the rain. Lightning and thunder patter the water, devouring everything. Incredulous, the boy looks up to heaven - is this his destiny?

A lowly farmer whose wife is afflicted with a lingering illness gets involved in kidnapping that goes awry and culminates in tragedy. Years later, he turns to a crusading lady journalist to confess the details of the sensational crime that remains unsolved.

After spending the last 30 years in prison, Horacia is immediately released when someone else confessed to the crime. Still overwhelmed by her new freedom, she comes to the painful realization that her aristocratic former lover had set her up. As kidnappings targeting the wealthy begin to proliferate, Horacia sees the opportunity to plot her revenge.

Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.

How does a dictatorship exhibit itself to the tourists visiting it? What kind of narration, actors, and staging does it summon? International Tourism has been shot as a recording of a show on the scale of a whole country, North Korea. Museums, painters’ studios, cinema production houses, or a chemical factory are presented to us by North Korean guides whose voices we never hear.

70 kilometers outside of Berlin, built on an old air base, sits an immense metal dome resembling a spaceship that today hosts a striking tropical park. Through the discovery of Tropical Islands and the multiple historical layers in which it is implanted, the film proposes a singular perspective on place and history, a poetic archaeology of our relationship with time, space, and illusion.

From a Post-colonial perspective Voignier’s Standing Still (2013) captures the turning pages of a book, cataloguing colonial hunters and their big game kills.

The implantation of African traders in Guangzhou is a recent phenomenon, on which Marie Voignier reports through her interlinking portraits of Jackie, Julie, Shanny who have come to set up their business on site. Amidst the monstrous accumulation of merchandise on the endless markets of the megacity, the film follows these African businesswomen grappling with the globalised Chinese economy.

The ambassador used to come here often, say the young men rooting around with sticks in the undergrowth where the German cemetery used to be. But the treasures hurriedly hidden there by the colonial rulers before they fled are long since gone. And that’s how the road to Yaoundé eventually became overgrown, the area and its inhabitants were left to fend for themselves.

In I Like Politics too, Marie Voignier continues her attentive exploration of countries where imaginary worlds, layers of history and present-day issues are intertwined – from post-communist East Germany (Hinterland, FID 2009) to Africa (L’hypothèse du Mokele Mbembé, FID 2011, Tinselwood, FID 2017).

Rituels brings together five channels of video moving from a pro-Palestinian demonstration in the Paris streets to a private S&M soirée in the same city, to its suburbs and a Kurdish community gathering, then far away to a Mexican hilltop, and to Turkish Kurdistan.

Two young women used their own body as a war weapon by participating in a hunger strike in the Turkish prisons in the year 2000. This hunger strike was repressed in a bloody way by the army. Between portraits and archives images, a reflection on the resistance and the sacrifice of the individual in front of the violence of the State.

It is an observation of the male body, sometimes solitary, especially in groups, perceived through a codified choreography.

The Kurdish rebels films their own everyday life on the border of Iraq and Turkey. An almost organic camera records the sensations. The war images in Kurdistan confront with the images of Kurdish refugees in the streets of Paris, questioning various strategies of construction of a community identity, tinged with idealism and with romanticism in the heart of the political and social violence.

A rattlesnake hunt. A rodeo. Gogo dancers. A love song. Two women and seven dogs. Such are the memories of an elusive narrator, a failed businessman, absent father, lost lover, who returns home after several years spent in Mexico.

Karima is a young dominatrix whom I filmed in the intimacy of her family, with her friends, and during sessions. Karima’s sadomasochistic practice has a maternal and generous propensity. The body appears alternately as a source of pleasure and pain, an object of adoration or disgust, a vehicle for emotions or an impenetrable border.

Landless Mexican peasants invent a new shape of fight by using their body as place of political and social resistance. Since the government does not want to recognize their existence, they will demonstrate completely naked in the streets of Mexico City, twice a day, until they are proved right.

Under the influence of a hallucinogenic cactus, a couple of French comes to introduce, like a virus, into a Mexican landscape whose practices, codes and uses they do not know.

The Kurdish lover is Oktay, the man with whom I share my life. We went to his village in Kurdistan, a region brought to a standstill by war. At this place, loving someone can become confused with having a hold over them. It is with humor that the characters featured in this film find ways, within their community, to affirm that they truly exist. A shaman goes into trance in front of the television, a hermit dreams of marriage, a shepherdess wants to leave the top of the mountain, soldiers watch over the village, a man from Europe goes off to request the hand of a young woman. It is through these situations that we discover the reality of families doing what they can to find a way of living together, to take the best – or the worst – from each moment.

Sometimes we find ourselves walking, talking or simply looking at things. That is what the protagonists of this film do. However, inside this mystery of life, we don’t know who they are or what they do. Teddy Williams builds yet again a dense and fantasmatic universe where breezes rhyme with vacancies and to the verb to be has its full double meaning. (M. V.)

Searching for a seed, a young man emerges from the underground where he hangs out with his friends. They all embark on a long digestive trip.

The accident leads a group of young boys from the high roofs of their neighborhood, passing through its destruction, to the deepest of the earth.

Climb up, let’s jump, the fields are green and the houses grey. We’re all small. It feels like the pores of my skin have become gigantic.

No es (It isn’t) is a cumulative poem by Mariano Blatt, whose constant writing process extends over a lifetime. The text of the poem, to which verses are added over days, months and years, can cover anything: images, people, memories, landscapes, phrases, ideas, etc. Having that list of “what seems to be but isn’t” ringing in his head, Eduardo Williams’ film Parsi observes in a perpetual movement the spaces and people to create another poem that is caressed, crashes and spins next to No es.

Buenos Aires. Exe, 25 years old, has just lost his job and is not looking for another one. His neighbors and friends seem as odd to him as they always do. Online, he meets Alf, a boy from Mozambique who is also bored with his job and who is about to follow Archie, another boy who has run away into the jungle. Through the dense vegetation of the forest, Archie tracks ants back to their nest. One of them wanders off course and comes across Canh, a Filipino, sitting on top of a giant heap of earth and who is about to go back to his strange, beautiful home town, where he too has a miserable job.

An elf falls asleep in the metro of Buenos Aires. What does he dream of? Maybe of being a young Bolivian man, a robot constructor, evolving in a city that seems to have been built by a child with a wild imagination. In his film, Eduardo Williams continues his project of connecting disjointed terrestrial. From Buenos Aires to La Paz, we move from cool to warm colors, from a fruit and vegetable shop to a dark cave where big metal figures are fabricated. Or maybe something else is being made there. Indeed, it is far away in the phantasmagoric woods of Fontainebleau that those metallic experimentations come to life as agile as voguing dancers. In a few minutes, we travel through three countries, two continents and through the bodies it captures, the voices and sounds it registers, it is the entire world manifesting at our senses.

video by Eduardo Williams with Jared Vargas and Marcostone cat footage by Nahuel Perez Biscayart

Different groups of people wander in a rainy, windy, dark world. They spend time together, trying to get away from their depressing jobs, meandering constantly towards a disturbing surreal queer fantasy.

Self commissioned short to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Viennale.

Gaston Solnicki plays himself in this cinematic tribute to his friend Hans Hurch.

A one-minute short made for BAFICI (Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema)

Vienna, 2019 – the end of an era. The smoking ban in public places means that a part of Kaffeehaus culture has disappeared. Of all moments, this is the one that Angeliki chooses to buy an apartment with help from her interior designer friend, Carmen. Angeliki seems to have something against all of t

An unconventional portrayal of several young women witnessed in immersive yet indeterminate states: within their bodies, among their friends and lovers, and ultimately in a culture of economic and spiritual recession. Obliquely inspired by Bela Bartok’s sole opera, Bluebeard’s Castle.

Gastón Solnicki combines footage of Notre Dame’s statues presciently removed two days before the cathedral’s near-decimation.

After 40 of living in Germany, Argentinian composer Mauricio Kagel visits his hometown.

A portrait of Argentine director Gastón Solnicki's family over the course of the second half of the 20th century, Papirosen follows four generations still troubled by a war that’s never spoken of. The film juxtaposes different periods with their native image formats, along with landscapes, characters and international political events, as it focuses on a singular decade of a nouveau riche Argentine Jewish family, and the new generation’s introduction into familiar traumas and vitality.

Dora García proposes a soundtrack to the incredible feminist demonstrations that have been taking place – modifying and appropriating public space and public discourse – in Mexico City in the last 5 years. The film follows two paths: one, a collective recollection of images and sounds from these feminist marches in the city; two, the composition, recording and final performance of the film theme song by trans artist La Bruja de Texcoco.

Created thanks to the funds provided for the production of new artworks awarded to Dora García for the 45th PIAC, The Joycean Society is a film about a book club dedicated to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, a society made up of students, admirers and connoisseurs of what is often said to be "the most difficult book in the world".

Literature and psychoanalysis are summoned here around a mythical figure of the intellectual, artistic and psychoanalytical history of pre-dictatorship Argentina: Oscar Masotta. Having introduced Lacan’s thought in Latin America as well as structuralism, having taken action in defense of Pop art, and having himself initiated legendary performances, Masotta is at the heart of that wonderful Fifties and Seventies effervescence. But for as distinct a character as this one, Dora Garcia neither films the biopic, nor does she merely deliver the servile reconstruction of an anthology of his « actions ». Better still, and through an impure mix of both, with other elements at the forefront, she proposes floating evocation, much like psychoanalytical listening.

Love with Obstacles focuses on the extraordinary author, Marxist feminist, October revolutionary, political exile and diplomat, Alexandra Kollontai (St. Petersburg,1872– Moscow, 1952). The film dives into the conservation of her legacy in Moscow archives, what has been told and untold, and her vision of the future of a socialist feminist revolution. Love with Obstacles is the first part of the feature film Amor Rojo (to be completed in 2021) which will draw a fuller portrait of a figure that is able to bridge a century of feminisms, from first wave to fourth and fifth, across a couple of oceans, from Russia to Mexico and the Pacific. Through her legacy and its place in the history of ideas, the film seeks to draw a genealogy to today’s renewed surge of feminism.

A Paleolithic man discovers a mysterious black liquid gurgling from inside his cave. At first contact, he finds himself immersed in a transcendent journey of exploration.

A woman and a man meet for lunch in the midst of a mountainous landscape in Lebanon when a war seems to explode in the distance.

Each morning Beirut awakens to a new murder seemingly committed by a serial killer, with victims found emptied of their blood. At the same time a doctor, Khalil, begins to experience strange symptoms that destabilise him and transform his life. A connection slowly emerges that seems to link Khalil to these victims. Salhab’s body of films have come to narrate the state of Lebanon – and Beirut in particular – during and after the civil war, and this film is no exception.

In 1958, in Senegal, land of emigration, Zahia Salhab gave birth to her first child Ghassan. During the same period, Lebanon, their homeland, is driven into a significant local conflict, a preamble to the next civil war.

After surviving a car crash in the middle of Lebanon's isolated Beqaa Valley, an amnesiac man finds himself held hostage on a local farm that doubles as an illegal drug-production facility.

In Chinese Ink, composed from a series of shots taken with an iPhone, Salhab expands questions of location and the act of filmmaking itself. Some images were captured in the moment ‘without quite knowing why’, and others were filmed at an earlier time ‘with no apparent motive’ or as a result of specific circumstances. Salhab jotted down notes all along, excerpts from books he read or reread, sounds he recorded and preserved. He approached this film essay as a work in progress with no preconceived structure; instead, he let the work gradually reveal itself. All at once, in terms of ‘place’ and his relationship to ‘here’, with all its entanglements, it became clear to him that he needed to invoke the ‘elsewhere’, to start with the first place, his childhood in Senegal, and ‘retrace’ certain steps: his connection to armed struggles, the Palestinian cause, the present moment.

Following on from the 2006 Israeli aggression on Lebanon, the filmmaker tries to film the destruction of Beirut. We witness a city deserted by life, and ghostly characters who, featured in his earlier films, talk about living through such a war.

Film directed by Ghassan Salhab

A journalist and a photographer drift on their way between Beirut and Baalbeck. Their journey is repeated three times in three different ways to evoke current issues and confusion in Lebanon’s present state.

X arrives in a small town and witnesses a violent act; Z takes the job of a dead manager and discovers that he had a notebook written in code and a map; H is hired to go down a river and investigate a series of mysterious monoliths built on the shore.

A film in six episodes, connected by the same four actresses, full of various subplots that play with narrative and different cinematic genres , everything structured in an unusual way.

On 9 July – Argentina’s Independence Day – Llinás sets off in Buenos Aires with his regular cameraman Agustín Mendilaharzu to re-record ‘Corsini interpreta a Blomberg y Maciel’, an album made in 1929 by lyricist Hector Pedro Blomberg and composer Enrique Maciel, as an ode to Juan Manuel de Rosas, leader of the Argentine Confederation.

The election of the National Queen in General Roca (Argentina)

Is this film about Clorindo Testa or not? Is it about the life of the director, about the life of his father, about the life of his country, or is it just one of those biographical films that proliferate at film festivals in which the narrator spends his time recounting family anecdotes and pulling old photos out of a box? This small, microscopic adventure, whose subtitle, stolen from the Savoyard Xavier de Maistre, could well be Voyage autour de mon père, navigates between these threats and others even worse.

An album of odd and humorous stories on small places exclusively dedicated to idleness, which are empty in winter and crowded in summer: the spa towns. Cities under water, luxury hotels, mermaids, sea animals, sand castles, people who worship water, praying for health…

Experimental short film about a violin player.

A portrait of the American percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky.

Resonating Surfaces is triple portrait, of a city, a woman and an attitude to life. For the personal story of Suely Rolnik, who is a Brazilian psychoanalyst currently living in São Paulo, involves the Brazilian dictatorship of the sixties as well as the Parisian intellectual climate surrounding Deleuze and Guattari in the seventies. The film is woven through by different themes: the other and the relation to otherness, the connection between body and power, the voice and, ultimately, the micropolitics of desire and of resistance.

A collection of images of constructions of the artist's son filmed over a period of three years. The duration of each shot is around 20 seconds, the length of time you can film with a bolex 16 mm camera when winding it manually.

Experimental film about John Cage's famous musical piece.

The film one, two, many consists of three performances: a flute piece with continuous breathing; a spoken monologue; and a song by four singers in front of an audience. Starting from different audio-visual perspectives, each section explores the existential space of the voice. Connecting the three performances are the central themes of the individual's body, listening to the other, and finding the right distance for multiple voices in a social space.

Dance and repetition interact with film language

Experimental film about Jazz.

In a string of recent works the artist avoids building up tension. By concentrating on speechless, plotless situations, she explores the timespan between the already and the not yet; the time of potentiality. Part of From Nothing to Something to Something Else, a tryptich that revolves around informal learning processes among teenagers.

November 1980. Southern Iran. We are at the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war. Abadan, the capital of the Iranian petrol industry resists the repeated assaults of the Iraqi army, but is soon under full siege. Omid, a 14-year-old boy, has stayed back in the city, with his grandfather, waiting for his elder brother to come back from the frontline. Along with Omid, we discover several other uncommon characters, each one having stayed for a personal reason. Each one resisting in his own way. But as the Iraqi siege of the city hardens, Omid has to quickly find a way to save those he loves.

"Morteza, in his fifties and just out of jail, is trying to rebuild his life. However, when he is implicated in the drowning death of a child, he is instantly assumed to be guilty. Taher, the police officer assigned to the case, first believes in his guilt, but later becomes obsessed with proving Morteza's innocence. Directed by Sepideh Farsi, and stars Masoud Rayegany and Bijan Emkanian.

A politically complacent middle-aged man and a young pro-democracy activist debate about the future of their country while hiding from the police, in this fascinating drama that blends scripted scenes with on-the-ground footage from Iran’s 2009 Green Revolution.

I Will Cross Tomorrow

The film is a well dug into the past. Made with bits of an unfinished film, "Red Shoes,” which was to be the director's very first auto-produced short film, but that remained “unborn” due to lack of money. What links the 16 mm footage that is the body of the present film, the poem that represents the heart of it, and the finished opus Letter to an Unborn Child represents close to thirty years of the Sepideh Farsi's life.

Documentary secretly filmed in the streets of Teheran.

From Afghanistan, little is known but a few cliches, the word Taliban, and a war that seems to have never ceased since the Soviet era and its new turn taken since 2001. A country devastated in a state of permanent conflict, a population deeply marked: how to do it justice? Equipped with her only camera, reconnecting with her beginnings on documentaries, the director embraces the beautiful ambition to reach the intimate heart of the country.

A film casting in Paris. Young actresses (and actors) try to incarnate the Swiss writer and traveler Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908-1942). In order to get the role of this emblematic and sulfurous figure of the late 30's, child of the 'lost generation', antifascist and gay, this actors play scenes of her life, try to assume poses of hers from photos, and talk about their own life through the prism of her fascinating and ambiguous personality. A portrait arises, singular and multiple, public biography and intimate memory, drawn up by the woman of the past as well as by the young generation of 2014. Slowly, a reconstituted and collective figure emerges and encounters an own fictitious life.

Jean is a fireman whose girl friend Albertine died of a horse accident shortly after having left him. He suffers a great pain because he had serious hopes of her coming back home. It’s a double punishment which he attempts to confess to his fellow firemen between two rescue urgencies. His grief and his doubts invade gently the fire station.

Directed by Véronique Aubouy

She menage to save from a fire a bunch of pictures and a diary written by hand. Those words and faces becomes the last traces left from the man she one day knew and loved. Crossing mountains and roads, she tries to remake his steps. The places she vists bring people, gestures, memories and histories that slowly become part of her life.

During one night, a woman walks through Rio de Janeiro, and hears the music around: jazz, rock, eletronica...

Music about becoming women in the contemporary world, their emancipation and struggles

For the KOGI Indians, there is a great mirror that divides two worlds, the perceptual and the sensory. The abstract world of meanings is not what we sensorially perceive, but the world of what the KOGI call "aluna." This world is what gives meaning to the destiny of life.

An experimental, visual poem that registers life and the architecture of Sintra (Portugal), captured by Paula Gaitán and featuring glimpses into her own photography art, rural/urban contrast, and memories with Glauber Rocha and family. Accompanied by the soundwork and music of L. Borgia Rossetti.

Reviewing home videos, filmmaker Paula Gaitán constructs a curious narrative about her youth while talking to her children. A filmic note in the form of an essay based on material made in Super 8. "Of which there are no limits, and full of affection and imagination", says the author.

Slowly and elegiacally, the camera glides at first over a forest shrouded in fog, then over a panorama of Rio de Janeiro. An off-screen voice tells us that Rio is a factory of dreams and nightmares, a city of transformations. In her essayistic film, director Evangelia Kranioti explores the poetic words of her transgender narrator Luana Muniz, who is herself an icon of Brazil’s queer subculture. Amidst a somnambulistic tide of images she enters the pulsating world of creatures of the night. A stream of consciousness from Brazil’s underground flows straight into the heart of the city’s street carnival. In between the masks and the make-up, the young, naked and new bodies and a spectacular firework display, people come into view who have undergone a transformation that makes it difficult to clearly ascribe them to any gender. A white clown leads us through the film’s visual universe in which, all of a sudden, raw-faced anti-government protests also put in an appearance

This essay film tells of the ocean as a place of yearning, of the world of giant container ships and their crews, and the women that wait for them in ports and drinking holes. The protagonists' thoughts are rendered as inner monologues in voiceover, all set to striking documentary images. Sandy represents all the women willing to give themselves to strange men, the perfect complement for the desire of all those roaming restlessly from port to port. The film has an affectionate eye for this eccentric former prostitute, for her body marked by life, lust, and the men she's met, as well as for her free, yet romantic idea of love. She is a siren and Penelope in equal measure.

One man, one night, one wonder.

Where should one go to do things which are forbidden? Some place where it’s dark.

Lisa, a photographer, goes missing. The last information on Lisa is that she's been photographing football stadiums in seven different villages all over Georgia. Her dad Irakli decides to search for her and travels to those places. Levani, Lisa's best friend and an invisible person, sets off to help. As the scenery changes from one football stadium to another, people change and people's stories change. Tensions build up on those simple and sometimes fun adventures as every football pit and every village travelled leaves less of a chance to find Lisa at all.

It’s love at first sight when Lisa and Giorgi meet by chance on a street in the Georgian city of Kutaisi. Love strikes them so suddenly; they even forget to ask each other’s names. Before continuing on their way, they agree to meet the next day. Little do they know that an evil eye casts its spell on them. Will they manage to meet again? And if they do, will they know who they are? Life goes on as usual in their hometown, street dogs stray, the soccer world cup begins and a film crew on its quest to find true love might be what they need.

Three people were sitting in the cafe when the man enters. Not all saw the donkey, he has staked out. No one could remember what he ordered. Wherever he went, and no one knew. But a short time later, three people are dead “Looking Back is Grace” is a film. A story is told. People can be seen. And an animal also. The animal is somebody’s ride. Because of the rider, people’s lives change. Because of the person who causes these changes, again other people’s lives find an end. Some people’s lives are changed. Some people’s lives are ended. All in rather peculiar ways. “Looking Back is Grace” is a film. In this film, peculiar incidents, which happened some time ago, are shown.

In "Parmi nous", Amin, a young illegal immigrant, has recently joined a group of other illegal immigrants camping in the forest. With every night comes the opportunity to attempt sneaking into the dockyards and hiding under a truck.

For the making of "Assange Dancing", Cogitore used an amateur video shot and published online by the DJ of a club in Reykjavik in 2011. It shows the activist and Wikileaks founder dancing on a semi-deserted dancefloor.

A filmic essay/poem blending fictional images and archival footage from the Pathé and Gaumont collections from the early XXth century. Based on two figures/characters and paced by their interior monologues, Chroniques explores the mythologies of exile and exodus. From the grain of stock footage to the pixel of digital image, this film peruses the history of Europe the way we peruse a family photo album : between personal account and fictionalization.

Tucked away in their Moscow apartment, Ely and Nina Bielutine jealously guard one of the most significant and mysterious Renaissance art collections in Russia. Surrounded by their crow and cats, under the watchful eye of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Rubens, Ely and Nina live in a world of their own, a fictional realm where art and lies have gradually gotten the upper hand over reality.

October 22, 2010: the nuclear-powered submarine H.M.S Astute left the Edinburgh naval base on a personnel transfer mission.

Follow in real time the peregrinations of a small pack, prisoner and resigned, recount death like a children's tale, share the twilight between tranquility and terror. Film the fence as one would a still life.

Hundreds of small luminous screens float above a human sea : a concert audience takes pictures with their cell phones of a scene outside the frame. Like the subtitles of an absent song, or the inner voice of an invisible narrator, verses from R.M. Rilke’s "Duino Elegies" punctuate this enormous collective wave of energy redolent of a digital ceremony.

The sense of rituals and the manifestation of the sacred has underpinned all of Clément Cogitore's oeuvre, inspired by gatherings, communal phenomena, and the expression of beliefs of today, be they erratic or diffuse, or without a defined subject. The spread of images and the way in which they have become commonplace constitute the off-screen "narrative" of this approach: the artist confronts and responds to this with a visual intensity and a sense for storytelling that borders on the fantastic.

Les Indes Galantes (The amorous indies), is an opera-ballet created by Jean Philippe Rameau in 1735. He was inspired for one of the dance by tribal Indian dances of Louisiana performed by Metchigaema chiefs, in Paris in 1723. Clément Cogitore adapts a short part of the ballet by mobilizing a group of Krump dancers, an art form born in Los Angeles black ghetto in the 1990s. Its birth occurred in the aftermath of the beating up of Rodney King and the riots, as well as police repression it triggered. Amidst this coercive atmosphere, young dancers started to embody the violent tensions of the physical, social and political body. Both the tribal dance performed in Paris in 1723, and the rebelious Krump dancers of the 1990s shape a reenactment of Rameau’s original libretto, staging young people dancing on the verge of a volcano.

She losses her sight. Once back among friends and family: blindness, isolation and a strange perception of the bodies around her. Rejection of this changes and an abrupt decision to put an end to it all. In the peacefulness of early morning, the terms of a new shared existence take shape.

Following an urban redevelopment project, Géro is about to be evicted from his home and his small theatre, where he no longer plays since he lost his voice. A nephew he barely knows suddenly settles in his home. He wants to write.

Teenagers playing knights. They dream of a future far from their native village of Beauce. A loving and poetic glimpse of the young people and their surroundings, the French countryside. Julien prepares to leave his friends, his parents and the landscape of his childhood.

1958. A twenty-year-old man leaves his native Algeria to make a living. Fifty years later, three teenagers and a big apartment overlooking a Parisian boulevard. At the corner of a room, a window, a face, come the films of Guy Gilles, traces, voices and images of an unknown work, out of tune with his time.

A village in the Tarn region in summer. They work in offices or factories, are doctors, teachers, or retired people. They come together to tell a story, and to sing it. Songs seep into everyday life, becoming a part of the landscape.

That evening, Victor, aged thirteen, does not want to go home. Also, ayoung woman, Sandrine, pushes away the the moment when she will find her lonely flat. Night is falling, in Orléans, shortly before Christmas.

Victor, in his early 20s, works at the town hall and lives with his girlfriend Charlotte, who is expecting their first child. When an incident happens at the nearby nuclear power plant, he and his high school friends are forced to confine themselves inside a farmhouse, whereas they should have evacuated the area. As the rain is threatening, they are keeping an eye out for the radioactive cloud. The next 24 hours will be crucial.

A young man seems to be dreaming of a reality different from the business he is about to take over and the married life that goes with it; he is drawn to the spicy life of a queer vaudeville troupe performing in his village.

I give a friend a tale to read. He leaves his house, walks across the countryside, repeats the tale to himself, and arrives at the sea. And so it was that a stonecutter, who became rich, then king, then sun, then cloud, then rock, became a stonecutter once again.

Marion is a low-level employee in a high end ready-to-wear clothing business. He has a sole obsession: to present a prototype he's made to his boss, Monsieur Charlie. Jeanette, who he's very fond of, is worried and looks for him everywhere, while Michel, who controls the merchandise, wants to tell Monsieur Charlie that something isn't quite right about this particular morning.

A portrait of the filmmaker's 99-year old grandmother.

A french 72 minutes documentary by Pascale Bodet.

"Complet 6 pièces" takes place in Paris in some couture workshops. It is a film made up of sketches, where by six times, working situations slip.

A girl wakes up and heads to work in Pascale Bodet's first short film. Screened for the first time since it was shot three decades ago, Corps social demonstrates that something as simple as a meal or a bike ride can take on a playful and ineffable dimension. In her films, those moments in which seemingly nothing happens become a discreet but luminous choreography of everyday life.

Grafting, pruning, cutting, "L'Art", portrait of a gardener at work. A film titled like a Magritte painting.

An audio-visual installation by Helena Wittmann and Nika Son, based on the interaction of the shape and the sound from waves. The delicate image-installation arouses an awe of audiovisual senses to the audience. The shape of waves, the pitch of sound, and the innumerably changing waves made by screens of two different sizes, create the message of formation, evolution and extinction in the audio-visual, synesthetic sense.

Two women spend a weekend in the North Sea. One of them will soon return to her family in Argentina, whereas the other one will try to come a step closer to the ocean. She will cross the Atlantic Ocean on a sailing vessel. Time leaves the beaten track and the swell lulls to deep sleep. The sea takes over the narration. When the other one reappears, the wind is still in her hair while the ground beneath her feet is solid. She returns and the other one could ask: “Have you changed?”

This precisely calibrated domestic diorama alights upon the imagined futures of a group of anonymous young adults. In Helena Wittmann’s warmly rendered feat of formalist filmmaking, questions of time and the realities of space convene in languid interior pans, incremental shifts in light, and the private reflections of her subjects.

The film is a form-concious study of a city as well as of a site specific artwork by Anthony McCall. In it’s own way the film enables to re-experience this city again and again. On the other hand the film is a documentation of the artwork; of its conditions and its becoming.

Ida lives with a crew of five on a sailing yacht. During a shore leave in Marseille, the French Foreign Legion attracts Ida’s attention and she sets herself a new goal. Via Corsica, where the largest regiment of the Legion is stationed, the route leads to the Algerian town of Sidi-Bel-Abbes, which served as the Legion’s headquarter until the country gained independence in 1962. On their journey, Ida and her crew do not only breakthrough geographical borders. The past is reflected in the present, different languages seek their common ground, bacteria and fungi penetrate the film material and social hierarchies are reshaped. With every day of the journey, the different layers of narration become increasingly interwoven. The film traces connections and conditions that describe our present and therefore takes an example from the sea. As the origin of all life, the sea contains all information about it, but in the constant transition from one state to the next it can never be determined.

In addition to demonstrating the unexpected complexities of individual life paths, THE WILD establishes the possibility of “cinematic space” becoming a type of “third space”. Two seemingly contrasting spaces merge to construct a new space. The first space is the living room of a retired couple. The second space is embodied in Super 8 recordings filmed by the old man during his numerous trips to Africa and Asia during the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. The pictures show exotic animals which are projected directly onto the walls and furniture of the house. The assembly of these differing spaces does not create a more succinct boundary between them, but rather assists in the mingling of the two spaces. In this fleeting moment of third space, as it is limited by time, a new cinematic reality is formed.

The image of a room, its appearance changing with the shades of light. A window front, seen through the window. Changing flower arrangements on a side table. Sounds, entering the room from outside the frame. A construction site hints at changes in the exterior. Rehearsals. Are the sound waves of the piano reaching us from downstairs or from next door? In 21.3°C Helena Wittmann reduces the filmic elements to the essentials: light, shadow, sound, direction. Out of this minimum, stories emerge that linger, atmospheres that resonate. Little by little the viewer is thrown back upon herself/himself. Through the facing window front someone seems to look back at us. Only the temperature remains the same.

Quixadá, Brazil. The sun goes down and the darkness reveals its fine layers of light on the last mountain to fall into darkness. The light continues inside it. Darkness is not only the absence of light in vision. It is clearly audible.

Over and over again, structures of larger contexts can be retrieved in details. They mirror, they contradict, they caricature each other. And again, all human thinking seems to be an enormous utopia within the framework we can hardly adjust. Our physical space is limited, but therein, mental constructions come to improbable proportions. The film connects fragments of memories, thoughts and observations, finding recurrent themes in different graduation. Therefore these fragments become something different, they form their own.

Three young men, two brothers and their cousin, meet on a dense summer night to feel the "high" of a dozen "Hasiklidika" songs, Rebetiko songs from the beginning of the 20th century which celebrate the effects of Hashish. But beyond the pleasures of drugs, it is here question of love, joy and sadness, search for freedom and political commitment - Little by little yesterday's counter-culture, made out of poverty and violence, and built on the pains of exile, reverberates the one of today.

A young woman in Tokyo links the mysterious death of a journalist to the Hashimoto experiment that attempted to teach a cactus the alphabet. Fiction and documentary alternate freely, using various film formats.

BACK TO 2069 looks at the eroded landscape of the Greek militarized Aegean island Lemnos, a political space where a myth meets contemporary concerns upon the relation of virtual and real image production. There a solitary man shape-shifts from argonaut to avatar through various hallucinations, experiencing different states of embodiment and disembodiment. Although he exiled himself from Athens to escape the crisis, past and future scenarios of conflict are gradually catching up on him. What appears to be a fiction is made out of documentary footage that interweaves the man's venture on the island with recorded Arma 3 video-game sessions from Youtube.

The county of Yoknapatawpha cannot be found with the aid of maps; it is the invention of the American author William Faulkner, and the setting of his classic novels. Tracing its tracks into the present, Elise Florenty & Marcel Türkowsky conjure a vanished landscape, saturated in its sultry atmosphere and eidetic visions.

Spring 2020: in Mexico City, a group of friends get together to rehearse a play. They gradually find themselves connected to the history of the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán valley, home to the world’s largest cactus forest. Somewhere between a phantasmagorical fiction and a historical investigation, Ollin Blood challenges our relationship with nature and all its contradictions.

An elderly woman discovers an adolescent wild boar on her doorstep and decides to adopt the beast as her last -- and most beloved -- child.

After the death of his father, Pierre and his friends Marie and Bénaïd, travel to Vézelay to Georges Bataille's tomb. There, they are get in touch with a priest, who seems to distinguish tourists from mystics, those who come for God and those who come for the writer.

African immigrants start working on a farm in Normandy and hope to open their own restaurant someday.

“It was on Foula, the furthest island from the main island [Shetland Isles], that we ran into Jovan. Or rather he ran into us, coming off the ferry late in the day. The mist was thick and we looked worn-out. He took us under his wing and offered to show us around the island the following day. There is a long sequence shot of the passing scenery, taken from inside his car. Driving along the only road, Jovan pointed out to Vincent the island’s disarray: abandoned cars and tractors, heaps of rusting scrap metal. Then on another island, Papa Stour, with a view of Foula, we filmed what was to become the first part of the film.”

A walker who crosses three regions: Vattetot-sur-mer in the Pays-de-Caux region, Saint-Firmin-des-Bois in the Gâtinais region, and Carrouge in Switzerland, drawing an imaginary geographical thread between the places where we live and the place where Gustave Roud spent time on his family farm in the Pays-de-Vaux region. This film was inspired by Gustave Roud’s text, whose title we have borrowed. Travelling through landscapes, looking closely at the tiny and changing forms of nature, meeting living beings – animals and people.

Pierre Creton placed his camera opposite the small black table that had always stood in the middle of the lawn facing the front of the house. He filmed himself gardening – potting plants, preparing cuttings. Cat, dog, donkey, hens are moving about, playing, resting around the table, the goat is prancing on the table top, the whole menagerie is living its life, crossing the frame freely. On these images of perfect insouciance, he edited the sound of a radio news report about the Fukushima disaster. The date is March 2011: here, the garden, the end of winter and the pleasure of plunging one’s hand into the earth, touching the plants, to prepare for spring’s arrival; over there, death, sky and sea contaminated for many years, untouchable. The garden is not at odds with the disaster provided it heeds its echo, albeit unwillingly. The garden table is also the altar where domestic rituals are performed to ward off the horror.

“I talked to Françoise Lebrun about the nightingales’ song at Vincent’s place in the Loiret. She then introduced me to Colette’s Les Vrilles de la vigne [The Tendrils of the Vine], a text that she had read at a friend’s funeral. The idea for this very simple film came to me with Françoise’s voice: ‘As long as the vine grows, grows…’, to the song of the nightingales, as night was falling, at Vincent’s place. We did three takes, three readings one after the other, so that the last would finish deep in the night. I kept an excerpt from the second take and the end of the third, in the darkness. This film was the trigger for Maniquerville.”

During a trip to China with Vincent to meet people in art schools and universities, I discovered the work of Deng Guo Yan, the director of the Tianjin school of contemporary art. A painting style that seemed to me to be a mix of traditional Chinese painting, Claude Monet and Cy Twombly, and which I liked. The black and white of his large ink brush paintings on paper, almost the size of a mural, made it possible for me to jump from black and white to colour in this film, as I had done in the Recueil but with other connotations: with excerpts from Jean Renoir in Aline Cézanne, photos of Le Havre destroyed in Papa, Maman, Perret et moi, and infrared images taken by Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt in Le Paysage pour témoin”.

In the Paris metro, there’s a man in a black mask. An anti-vax demonstration passes by the indifferent camera. The man goes home, the sound of social anger following him inside, but nothing seems to matter to him except his business with his double whom he finds inside the white walls The curve of his shaved head mirrors the sculpture behind him on the mantelpiece. Portraits appear in his back. Elsewhere, on the banks of the Seine, a woman and a dog look out into the distance, as if they’re waiting for something to happen. Pierre Creton’s adaptation of Maupassant’s short story is startling in its luminous serenity. It is above all a portrait, a black-and-white study of a body, a face and their clear, opaque beauty. Paying attention to it all is enough to ward off the ghosts and the madness. (Cyril Neyrat)

Gabriel Laurens, fifty years old, is a «private investigator». When his fifteen-year-old niece Jade comes into his life and asks him to investigate her father’s death, the detective is confronted with memories he thought were buried forever. Confronted with the ghosts of his past, Gabriel Laurens finds himself caught up in a strange investigation involving pretense, fantasy and drug trafficking.

At her grandmother's house, with her daughter, Lucie dreams of being an actress.

Thomas and Francis kidnap Wilfrid, the owner of a carwash. Surprisingly, he is delighted with being kidnapped, this company that imposes itself on him comes to brighten his own lonely life.

In 1973, following the coup d'état in Chile, the director's parents took exile in Rome where she was born. What is a handed-down memory?

Through illustrations and sounds, Una vez la noche experiments with the obsessive narration of four diverse characters –all of which are lost in the settings of their memory– to exhibit crucial events that marked their lives forever. Through a particular mise-en-scène, the film provides apparently ordinary people with a brilliant singularity, introducing us to a new perception of reality.

Three directors make a movie about the events of their past week. Relationships, work, and day-to-day personal struggle—the minute details still fresh on their minds—are shown with unseen crystal clarity that challenges the very notion of dramatic fiction.

The film centers on a high-school student experiencing the last day of summer.

In a small, snow-covered town in Belarus, a former English teacher manages to scrape a living distributing leaflets to people’s letterboxes. In the evening, he joins his wife in their dingy apartment, and together they reminisce about their son, a student in Minsk they rarely see. Possibly their only excitement of the week is buying a lottery ticket, which, for a few seconds, gives them a chance to dream. Yuliya Shatun’s camera, at first oddly focused on the white expanses along every roadside, then begins to scrutinise the teacher in his comings and goings – a precise recording with, however, a hint of the moroseness of a terrain so rare in today’s cinema. The teacher has stoically adapted to a degenerate world and a life fuelled by stifled shame. An odour of neglect wafts between the apartment blocks, the uttered words and the background noise of the television. A certain irony floats in the air too, and it needs Yuliya Shatun’s patience to grasp and take responsibility for it.

An unbiased observation of the celebration of Independence Day of Belarus in Minsk on 3rd of July 2018.

Listening to the persistent humming sound, we follow the author on her existential journey through four cities consisting of real images and footage taken by the director’s father 25 years ago that always bring us to some visible or invisible border.

Minsk Komarovsky market is the main food market in Belarus. People call it “Komarovka”. It organically coexists people of all ages, backgrounds and characters. While for some the market has become a second home, others continue to dream of more.

For nearly 10 years, Belarus has had a Shelter — place for women victims of domestic violence. This is a big private house in Minsk. Many victims are brought here directly in their home clothes — the only thing they were able to escape from the aggressor. Belarus has not yet adopted a law on combating domestic violence. In this issue, you will find out the real stories of residents of the Shelter, what problems not only clients but also employees of the shelter have to face, and why it is so important to pass a law.

Belarus is the only country in Europe where there is still a compulsory assignment of students studying at the expense of the state budget. The best graduates of the country who have passed a large competition for admission and who have earned the right to study for free with their knowledge are sent to places where no one else agrees to work due to difficult working conditions and lack of infrastructure.

Nijat, an emotionally empty young man, visits his childhood town of Goychay after years of living abroad. Enigmatic about his occupation but clear about his financial distress, he seeks an old family friend's help to sell his deceased father's house.

In the forgotten district of Bilesuvar, South of Azerbaijan, some men and women are looking for something in their dimly enlightened lives. They want to tell us their wishes, their despairs and their fights. It's all about Bilesuvar's soul.

A brother writes to his sister. A brother loves his sister. is it true that one can keep a young woman through writing? The ambition is great. A long correspondence of 149 letters, this film is based on the letters that my brother Didier wrote to me. Two actors carry his poetic writing to a new perception. Axel Bogousslavsky and Nathalie Richard are the brother and sister. They sing, they dance on the roads, on a journey, in the land of « Didierlangue ».A crazy bet, yes, funny, delirious, that of a fable, where the French language is shaken up.This film explores how writing and the experience of a hybrid language create a film about love.