LOS DESNUDOS — Notre corps est une arme

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.

For the 30th anniversaire of FIDMarseille about thirty directors have done us the honor of offering us some very beautiful short films.

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.

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.