Les Équilibristes - Nico Papatakis, Jean Genet

Unrest is the third movement of a triptych by Philippe Grandrieux whose common thread is anxiety. The theme of Unrest is “la petite mort”.

A week after the Dayton accords, Phillipe Grandrieux visits Sarajevo accompanied by Sada, a Bosnian who is returning home after four years of exile.

Seymour, a young American, arrives in a city in Eastern Europe. He's accompanied by Roscoe who has come to negotiate the buying and selling of men and women. Seymour encounters Melania, one of Boyan's 'girls'. Boyan controls the people smuggling trade. Fascinated, Seymour wants to possess Melania, but the price he has to pay is tremendous: betray Roscoe. Seymour accepts the deal. Roscoe is eaten by dogs. Seymour must then affront a new life.

The action unfolds in a country about which we know nothing, a land of snow and forests, somewhere in the North. A family lives in an isolated house near a lake. Alexi, a young, pure-hearted man, is a woodcutter. Occasionally suffering from epileptic seizures and overcome by an ecstatic state, he is one with the nature around him. Alexi is very close to his younger sister, Hege. Their blind mother, father, and younger brother, silently observe this uncontrollable love. One day a stranger arrives, a young man slightly older than Alexi.

A handheld video camera explores image-surfaces as a visual collective unconscious: a TV screen, Polaroids, photos. A conceptually and formally compelling film about the idea of change, the loss of a revolution, the defying memory of the 70s decade.

Philippe Grandrieux evokes the obsessive relationship between two women whose existence is kept by a lugubrious voice and by Alan Vega’s and Marx Hurtado’s famous Saturn Drive Duplex.

A FICUNAM commission for four directors, Liminal seeks to play with poetic affinities between film and music. Moving across aesthetic and generational differences, the film-makers explore this relationship through four distinct stories as to context and imaginary.

We enter the film like into a dream. Paris. Lenz looks for Madeleine who has mysteriously disappeared. He encounters Hélène, a young woman bewitched by her self-destructive impulses. A crazy love develops between them. Louis and Léna, devoured by their jealousy, lead Lenz to follow, against his better wishes, Hélène into the subterranean world of a dark sexual exploitation network. Although lost, lost from the first, love is what saves us.