Cinéma du Réel 2023

<p>In Colombia, the &quot;whites&quot; think that the Indian of Amazonia does not feel anything because there are no words in his language to express feelings. Is it possible that a whole people feel nothing and have no words to speak of love? Director Sergio Guataquira Sarmiento, himself a descendant of an almost extinct indigenous Colombian community, went to meet the C&aacute;cuas, to talk about their feelings, their loves, their loneliness. In doing so, he reconnected with his own Indianness. With humor and tenderness, the C&aacute;cuas try to teach him what it is to be a native. This initiatory quest is an emotional x-ray of an entire people.</p>

<p>The town of Allensworth, California, was founded in 1908. Established, run, and entirely financed by African Americans, including Allen Allensworth, a former slave who became a high-ranking officer in the U.S. Army, the community was thriving at the turn of the 20th century and would be home to the state&rsquo;s first Black school district. Decades later, due to environmental factors and economic downturn, the town was all but abandoned, later to be reconstructed. In his new film, James Benning uses his structuralist approach to landscape to etch an evocative portrait of the town. In 12 static compositions of approximately five minutes, one for each month of the year, Benning trains the camera on different areas and aspects of Allensworth, mostly outdoor shots of restored houses and buildings set against desolate backdrops. With a judicious use of sound and occasional music, the haunting&nbsp;<em>ALLENSWORTH</em>&nbsp;marries the formal precision of so many of Benning&rsquo;s landmark works to a specific sociopolitical American history.</p>

<p>A single identity photo found after the death of my parents: that of my grandmother, Ana Rosa, who died before I was born and was never spoken of in the family. I only knew that she had undergone a lobotomy. I wanted to understand why, who and how. By drawing the threads of this tragic story, I explore the links between psychiatry and the society of its time and the very specific place of women in this history&hellip;</p>

<p>With their smartphone cameras, Parisian taxi drivers document La Base, a gigantic transit hub isolated on the outskirts of Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport, a rich microcosm of community life, a safe refuge to face the fast-changing world.</p>

<p>COMPETITION Margaret Tait&rsquo;s life revolved around cinema and poetry. In this documentary, Luke Fowler takes a vast collection of archival material and unpublished and undiscovered correspondence and notebooks to weave together an image of and an original tribute to the Scottish director and poet, blending their sensibilities.</p>

<p>A woman wakes up with this desire, to film blood. In Paris, her city, she meets people. A courier, a grafter, a chimera... And she remembers a trial she followed long ago. The contaminated blood trial. Meanwhile, deep in a forest, a dog leads her search for blood.</p>

<p>This is Brazza: an urban wasteland is living through its last hours. 53 hectares for the construction of a vast real estate project in tune with the times. The film scrutinizes the promise of a &ldquo;new art of living&rdquo; in the raw reality of the land.</p>

<p>In the Middle Ages, in Florence, Italy, a revolt of the poorest wool factory workers, the Ciompi, overthrew the government. Today, as I talk to the activist historian who brought this revolt to light, the workers of the modern textile industry are rising up.</p>

<p>The older generation sometimes disparagingly calls them &ldquo;coconut heads&rdquo; (or &ldquo;brainless youth&rdquo;), but the students at the University of Ibadan, the oldest in Nigeria, are anything but that. They follow-up their visits to a campus film club with in-depth discussions about subjects such as feminism, migration, human rights, colonialism, and politics. The debate gets heated sometimes, but always stays focused on the subject.</p> <p>Nigeria and its neighboring countries face many issues. Unemployment and corruption are rife, freedom of expression is under threat, and student life is tough for many reasons. Alain Kassanda intercuts his observational shots of these passionate group discussions with atmospheric impressions of campus life full of commotion.</p> <p>In the years that Kassanda films, from 2019 to 2021, students and their peers take to the barricades to resist police violence&mdash;there were even deaths at these protests in October 2020. This film, which shared the top prize at Cin&eacute;ma du R&eacute;el, is a dynamic portrait of a generation of Nigerians using their intelligence and critical thinking to demand change.</p>

<p>El Chinero is a site in the Desert of Baja, California. Despite its name, little proof exists about a tragedy that took place here in 1916. Hundreds of Chinese migrants died while fleeing violence in mainland Mexico. How can one fill the void with images, construct an archive where none exist?</p>

<p>This single-shot landscape film experiments with the rich sonic and visual resources of the night to evoke both wonder and mourning.</p> <p>Dusk falls on the coast of Gotland. One by one, individuals arrive in search of something amid the sand and rock. With only the glow of their cell phones to see, their eyes are fixed upon the land, even as their paths cross and light is shared. Yet amid the darkening sky, constellations emerge, with each star growing brighter relative to their proximity to us. Meanwhile, the blinding flash of the occasional meteor highlights the distances among stars and ourselves, opening our gaze to the unknown.</p> <p>At once melancholy and utopian, Eventide captures the myopia and missed connections of a scopophilic age, while honouring the powers of darkness, both cinematic and natural, to collapse distance and render the invisible visible.</p>

<p>Several women in their seasonal work as fire watchers in Portugal. The film comes close to their breathing, to the passing of time and to solitude, from within.</p>

<p>The warning labels found on some new microwave ovens may have comedic value (where but in America would users be warned not to put their pet in the device?) but we rarely notice the disclaimers preceding films. In fact, they are even more absurd: one very common one is &ldquo;This is a work of fiction.&rdquo; But producers, distributors and cinema owners protect themselves from accusations of offense caused by all sorts of other potential issues, like people of the same sex kissing, special effects, drug use, violence, unsafe behavior, and even cinematic experimentation.</p> <p>The fear of having to pay the price for being misunderstood can be traced back to the very beginnings of film&mdash;as proven by these disclaimers from the 1874&ndash;2022 period. While the tone of this litany of warnings may be deeply ironic, the feeling gradually creeps up on you that this legal straitjacket could fatally constrict the unique ability of film to imagine the unknown, and to suspend disbelief.</p>

<p>A couple who broke up fourteen years ago find that they can&rsquo;t remember how they broke up when they meet again years later. Over time, memories and places have been mixed. Everything overlaps in memory.</p>

<p>A reply to an earlier work &ndash; a radically digressive footnote &ndash; and the opening salvo of a new tendency. It is intensely personal and explores the relationship of storytelling to violence, to power, and to memory.</p>

<p>In everyday life, Cl&eacute;mence is a philosophy researcher.&nbsp;But during the medieval fantasy role-playing game&nbsp;Legends of Hyborea&nbsp;, she plays the chronicler Nuria Delorme.&nbsp;She travels the vastness of the game&#39;s lands to meet hundreds of other characters who populate this imaginary world.</p>

<p>Reem is a general practitioner at the Administrative Detention Centre in Marseille. She provides medical consultations for many of the men there. Their life is at a standstill and no one knows where they will be sent the following day. Reem, with a sympathetic ear and much respect, tries her best to help them.</p>

<p>Inserted between two short opening and closing shots, a sequence of some fifty minutes presents a young man&rsquo;s awakening. Two telephone conversations with an unidentified interlocutor reveal that he, along with his police colleagues, has taken part in crushing the demonstration supporting Algeria&rsquo;s right to independence on 17 October 1961, two days before the scene. On the wall behind him, a postcard from Lima in Peru, taken from the series that On Kawara sent each day to a different recipient until 1979, mentions the time of his waking-up on 19 October 1968. As for the title&rsquo;s time and date, these correspond to the moment Pierre Bal-Blanc organised the performance which the film documents &ndash; as attested by the presence of visitors grouped silently around the bed &ndash; in the Parisian contemporary art gallery gb agency. I GOT UP AT 8:59 AM OCT. 19 2021 synchronises three moments. The first is when France, through certain newspapers, was able to begin to take stock of the massacre perpetrated by its police force. The second is a banal personal event that art carries into collective chronology and memory. The third, halfway between the reactivation of a work of art and an improvisation inspired by real events, is an attempt to commune with history from the present day. The film based on this event makes no attempt to fully flesh out a document that the performance had begun to create, but rather builds on the possibility specific to cinema of inserting into the space of an awakening conscience the need to always think historically about our present.</p>

<p>John Cage&rsquo;s renowned composition receives a compelling remix while, in a recording studio in Columbia, Mississippi, Derek &ldquo;Dripp&rdquo; Whitfield Jr. and Taymond &ldquo;ChoSkii&rdquo; Hughes of the group BmE lay down a new track. Interpolating the worlds of hip hop and mid-century experimental music, Kevin Jerome Everson&rsquo;s<em>&nbsp;If You Don&rsquo;t Watch the Way You Move</em>&nbsp;both documents the labor process of the recording studio and subtly alludes to the filmmaker&rsquo;s own work of structural assemblage.</p>

<p>First encounters with the people of the lake. We share their experiences of this land, collective rituals that release bodies and minds into the same urge for freedom, of which the lake seems both the mirror and the source.</p>

<p>From princes of the old to today&rsquo;s Libya, history keeps moving through the land of the lake. Franck, Maria Pace and Moreno embody it and recount how powers turn the land into a territory. Their inventiveness is a resistant vitality in this little corner of our old Europe.</p>

<p>Planting, photographing, summoning protective ghosts, each invents an intimate bond with this land of the lake they live upon. Up to the mysterious Bisentina Island, secret heart of this imaginary that connects us to the common ground upon which all of us walk.</p>

<p>A man films living things. He archives them in paradoxical wet preparations. Images held in fluid that could outlive him. In 2100, his daughter will be 86. He will be 129.</p>

<p>20 years ago, the palenquero town of La Bonga received a threat signed by paramilitaries. That same night, 120 families left never to return. Today, La Bonga has been devoured by the jungle, and an entire generation only knows its town through stories.</p> <p>Mar&iacute;a has been the only person who has returned to live there. Many believe that she is crazy and that she is putting her life at risk. After two decades, Mar&iacute;a leads more than 300 people during the first collective return to La Bonga, to carry out a huge celebration.&nbsp;</p> <p>La Bonga is a symbolic journey through the jungles of the Colombian Caribbean to resurrect a place that only exists in memory, a farewell ritual to a people that was and will not return. In an act of resistance, this festival releases what was lost, letting it go, while celebrating its memory and its community.</p>

<p>At the Laberint d&rsquo;Horta in Barcelona, the film charts several journeys into the garden in search of its centre, where a statue of Eros waits. As the film navigates the maze&rsquo;s false pathways, its recursive structure begins to crack, and a mysterious underworld floods its gates.</p>

<p>The human race is old, but rocks are timeless. Weaving stunning imagery with evocative text and interviews, <em>Last Things</em> observes the history of all of us and this planet Earth through the most essential parts &mdash; evolution and extinction, from the POV of rocks. The immensity of our existence is hard to fathom, and we are obsessed with our past, looking for reasons. A huge journey we should take on a cinema screen.</p> <p>In a distinctive style seen throughout her long career, Deborah Stratman skillfully combines pure science with speculative fiction, not to give you an answer to the meaning of life, but to provide sounds, images, and ideas to contemplate. Using both microscopic and landscape photography, we see the luscious textures of rocks and matter and our handprints on it. Texts from writers enhance the journey, ranging from the creators of the science fiction genre to experts of stream-of-consciousness reflections. Stratman blurs the borders of poetry, narrative, and fact in an ethereal adventure. As one interviewee states, &ldquo;Rocks have a history, but they don&rsquo;t remember it.&rdquo;</p>

<p>Lensed with the fuzzy-edged resolution and smeary vibrancy of early-2000s standard-definition video, Tulapop Saenjaroen&rsquo;s film blends family drama, process documentary, and narratological meditation through the story of a man named Earth, his sister Ink, and their family business, a mangosteen-processing factory. Disagreeing with Ink on the nature of the future, Earth embarks on a project of his own: to investigate the nature of fabulation and the transmutation of the material world into new stories and new images.</p>

<p>The man honoured in this film&rsquo;s beautiful title had shared Dominique Cabrera&rsquo;s life since 1995, a year that saw the making of a film which recounted, among other things, the start of their relationship. With Demain et encore demain, Didier Motchane, a figure of French political and intellectual life, stepped into the life and work of Cabrera, then shooting her first feature-length film. MENSCH shows him stepping out of this life and work, carried off by a cancer against which it was agreed they would not fight. The moments gathered in the film are among the last shared by the couple. They could be ordinary moments, were they not inevitably permeated by the near prospect of death. This prospect is at the centre of their conversations, of course, and hangs like a shadow over the many moments of silence (Didier reads the paper, Dominique watches him, filming him), broken by the filmmaker&rsquo;s soft voice, when she says: &ldquo;This is nice&rdquo; or &ldquo;It&rsquo;s nice to be here&rdquo;. Meaning: We are here. All these chunks of a present so bare and so quiet (the film doesn&rsquo;t show anyone other than them, nothing else but their companionship) are bound up in the acute awareness of a moment being lived, if only because it is among the last. In Demain et encore demain, speaking about an ordinary piece of bread, Cabrera says: &ldquo;I want to film it because I want to see it.&rdquo; Here, addressing her lover on the eve of farewells, she says: &ldquo;I&rsquo;m filming you to watch you later,&rdquo; once again coining one of the clearest definitions of cinema.</p>

<p>Trude was my grand-mother. An admirable woman, a survivor, a terrible woman. Survival was everything. I didn&rsquo;t want to hear of death, I didn&rsquo;t want survival, I wanted life, I wanted freedom. I wouldn&rsquo;t film her, ever. Then, at the last moment, I did.</p>

<p>The Newest Olds transforms Detroit&rsquo;s iconic city-scapes, dislodging buildings from their foundations and collapsing the physical, political and sensory boundaries between Canada and the United States through alchemical, in-camera, and optical printing techniques.</p>

<p>An immersive meditation on travel and tourism in Laos, reflecting on how we all live as observers. Traversing the country&rsquo;s dusty roads and tranquil rivers, we watch as painterly tableaus unfold, revealing the interweaving of locals and foreigners in rest and play.</p>

<p>Otro Sol is a group of real and invented characters trapped in a film. It is also a purgatory of retired thieves set on the coast of the Atacama Desert. The film is circular and seeks to invent as well as verify the myth of Alberto C&aacute;ndia, a Chilean international thief who stole the Cathedral of Cadiz in Andalusia in the late 1980s.</p>

<p>On the Arctic Ocean coast of Chukotka live a people cut off from the world. Their life revolves around hunting walruses and whales and protecting villages from bears coming from the tundra. This theme turns the film into a reflection on death. Marine animals become the primary source of food for the people, animal leftovers are used to feed arctic foxes on a fur farm, human cemeteries become targets for bears. It appears that all the inhabitants of this region are involved in the cycle of food and death. The film departs from the typical rhythmic structure of cinema and instead adopts the structure of a shamanic ritual, which is a meaning-forming event for the northern peoples.</p>

<p>Saintonge is the former name of the Charente Maritime. In this land without folklore, the rondabout, a very French road design, has experienced a remarkable development. With the voice of a facetious narrator, the film goes from one roundabout to another, from yellow vests to oyster shells...</p>

<p>In real life, some want to become surgeons, others police officers, or cab drivers. There are those who dream of love, good fortune, or to make a place for themselves in the city. In this virtual territory, on this Californian island where French is spoken, it&#39;s the same, one does as in real life.</p>

<p>The inhabitants of a city awake one morning to find that never-before-seen trees, plants, and flowers suddenly erupted throughout the streets and in the squares. Strange and mysterious events start taking place as Camelia and Nahla investigate the origins of these new and peculiar creatures.</p>

<p>The actor Stefan Kolosko acts as a diver in the sunken city of Epecu&eacute;n, where he paraphrases a text by Jorge Luis Borges, and as a curator in Berlin&#39;s &quot;Humboldt Forum&quot;, where he enumerates the crimes of Wilhelm II. The architect Arno Brandlhuber comments on the reconstruction of the &quot;Berlin City Palace&quot;.</p>

<p>A postcard, a memory of Athens: on a welcoming stone, a young man folded up in his thoughts, then unfolding, just a little, to project them onto the landscape; in the background, a vestige; between the two, a few tiny passers-by, two-three stray dogs splitting the frame; and in the air, a record with tired grooves, a popular Greek song from which these words come up: &quot;postcard&quot;, &quot;memory of Athens&quot;. Are the films of Jean-Claude Rousseau postcards? Yes, basically: a certain eternity in the naked present of an image, brought back from where the eye has been. No, not at all: in the prison of its frame, the postcard image is without connection, without relation, except the fallacious one that makes words its reverse. Here, as always in Rousseau&#39;s work, the image does not exist without a relationship, and first of all with itself, since it is multiplied by the black frames that engulf it several times like a very slow fluttering of the eyelids. Each time she rises from this abyss, rescuing the spectator who had fallen in with her, she is neither quite the same nor quite another - something like: a memory of herself. And the very last image, since in truth there are two here (that is to say: an infinity plus one)? A real ghost, that one, brought back from a bit of dust by the mute grooves of the record.</p>

<p>In 1985, prosecutor Julio C&eacute;sar Strassera concluded his closing statement in the trial of nine Argentine junta leaders, including dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, with the words nunca m&aacute;s (&lsquo;never again&rsquo;). They stood trial for the unlawful detention, torture and murder of an estimated 30,000 Argentinians between 1976 and 1983, the period of the military dictatorship. The court case is unique because for the first time in history a military junta was put on trial after the restoration of a democracy.</p> <p>With archival footage, The Trial provides a shocking insight into what Strassera describes as &ldquo;a sort of descent into the sinister spheres of the human soul.&rdquo; The footage was selected from the 530 hours of recordings made by Argentine television, hardly any of which was broadcast at the time. As a viewer you are present in the courtroom, listening to witnesses filmed from behind who paint a horrifying picture of ruthless state terror.</p> <p>In addition to documenting the historic court case, The Trial illustrates the boundlessness of human perversity and sadism when legitimized by ideology.</p>

<p>Boys dive, cats moan, an old lady smokes, a guardian of the dead sighs, young people dance. They are the people of a ghost town: Beirut, which exists only in dreams.</p>

<p>Standing in front of the open window, a soft breeze playing through the curtains, an elderly man strangely sways to and fro. It is, for the most part, a puzzling behaviour, but one that still suggests some basic pleasure of the senses: feeling the stroke of the wind, joining in its dance. Another thing we know: the two senses by which the viewer experiences the scene are absent from this curious dance. The filmmaker&rsquo;s father, Horst, has almost lost his senses of sight and hearing as a result of a decline that is also chipping away at his memory. Once a loquacious professor, he has withdrawn into the semi-seclusion of his diminished mind. He has become an &ldquo;enigma&rdquo;, a &ldquo;winter lake&rdquo;, as his wife puts it. The film is indeed as much a portrait of her as it is of him. In this quiet house where she must come to terms with this enigma, she writes down her impressions. Both protagonists are viewed through the eyes of their son, who films them with equal tenderness and the help of a dozen 16 mm reels. The camera, trying to blend into the environment as it shrinks and fades away, captures the movements kept alive by habit and observes those brought on by decline. In doing so, the son follows the mother&rsquo;s lesson, when she says: &ldquo;There is no point in bringing you back to where our journey once began.&rdquo; A statement soon challenged by a beautiful scene which reveals that the memory of how the two first met has not vanished from Horst&rsquo;s mind. It&rsquo;s no surprise that the film&rsquo;s title takes its cue from it.</p>

<p>We could (should, even) dispense with an explanation, and simply take the friendly advice given by a first intertitle: &ldquo;Listen carefully&rdquo;. So, listen and look: the deep calm breathing of a son, a very big son, who is sleeping; the hand that is gently caressing his nape and belongs to the father, behind the camera. Off film, Philippe De Jonckheere explains that his son, Nathan, has a specific form of autism that is aggravated by his entry into adulthood: this is the when he films him, partly at the hospital where he has had to be placed temporarily, partly in the open air in a gentle landscape of lakes and forests. The film portrays their relationship but carefully refrains from recounting anything, especially as father and son are far from talkative. The peaceful fluidity of the film&rsquo;s progression almost has us forget that under its appearance of a visual diary, WHY THE LONG COFFEE? is more like a science of collage (the hospital sequences are traversed by captivating sound arrangements) that produces somewhat distraught even tearful sensations without words. In the C&eacute;vennes, where the film ends, these sensations evolve towards a peacefulness whose benefits bring relief to both son and father, as well as the viewer, under the double aegis of Fernand Deligny and a ray of sunlight that gently relays the paternal hand on Nathan&rsquo;s nape.</p>

<p>I&rsquo;m trying to film everyday life and its repetition, its accumulation. So that these videos become a viewpoint for our perception of reality &ndash; violent, touching, dirty and magnificent.</p>

<p>A woman dressed in red is scared of death. She ventures onto this dreaded path, as the story of a childhood pet chicken-turned-hen slips into her quest.</p>

<p>Through six characters, the discovery of different geographical and social areas and the dark and little-known underground labyrinth of Europe&rsquo;s largest business district, La D&eacute;fense.</p>

<p>A poetic refection on the exploitation of the water and hardrock mines in the Swiss Alps. Contemporary images and archives, documentary and fictional material immerge us in the geological and human memories that haunt the current extractive environments.</p>

<p>Amidst the chaotic celebration of a sports victory, a film student comes face to face with a traumatic memory. He is consumed by the desire to confront the man who inflicted it on him and uses cinema as a means of dealing with past trauma.</p>

<p>From the observation point of a commercial centre in the heart of Paris; silhouettes are looking at the sky waiting for something to happen. At the same time, on the borders of Europe, others are preparing their shopping lists.</p>

<p>In 1982 when she arrived in Paris, my Costa Rican mother sent a series of letters to her parents. Forty years later, I revisit these letters to have a better understanding of my history.</p>

<p>Holidays spent at my mother&rsquo;s. The atmosphere is tense: not only does she find it hard to accept that I&rsquo;m not the girly daughter she dreamt of having, but she is also in the middle of divorcing my stepfather. The stay promises to be eventful.</p>

<p>Friendship, creativity, authenticity and freedom of thought and expression: how these values can serve as sources of inspiration and strength in our lives.</p>

<p>Romy wants to become an actress and has always put on a performance. In 2022, she was 13 years old. Like all teenagers, she shows herself off on social networks and roots herself in a premature relationship to femininity.</p>

<p>One day, together with my friends, we installed a swing under a wind turbine, in a field of green peas.</p>

<p>Twenty-three-year-old Muhammad is stuck in Paris. While awaiting his drawn-out trial, he tries to find his place in this foreign city.</p>

<p>2048. Google owns most of the planet and is now run by Mark Zuckerberg. He finds a cure for death, through a digital immortality software that allows him to download himself into a hologram. While it is reserved for an elite group of rich and powerful men, a group of hackers seizes the source code of this program containing the antidote of immortality and makes it accessible to the whole world.</p>

<p>Eighteen years later, Amos Gitai returns to the house in his first film to observe what changes have come about for the new occupants and the neighbourhood.</p>

<p>Sylvana and Mohamad are old friends who like to walk together. She has a motor disability, he is blind. They share the same painful experiences, the same determination to be in the world, and to break the image of helplessness imposed on them. Their irrepressible freedom is a constant resistance.</p>

<p>From paternalistic and inquisitive bosses to underground miners, passing through emigrant labor and recruiters, through the settlements and slagheaps, we unfold a whole universe that we thought had disappeared while the energy crisis makes us look at coal with a new eye.</p>

<p>In 1989, after a clash near the border between Mauritanian shepherds and Senegalese peasants, there was an escalation of racist violence in both countries. These events caused thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of refugees. Today, despite appearances, the wounds have not healed.</p>

<p>Taking the meal he shares with Antonietta Pizzorno as his starting point, Luc Moullet, traces back the origins of the food on their table: a tin of tuna, an omelette and bananas. In doing so, he unravels the mechanisms of liberalism and makes a terrifying observation of modern society.</p>

<p>A few months before he died, Jean-Louis Comolli meets up with Dominique Cabrera for some free conversations with Isabelle Le Corff. They talk about cinema, life, love, death and Chassagne-Montrachet wine. There is laughter and smiles. One is not really serious at the age of eighty.</p>

<p>Abandoned during the 1948 war by its owner, a Palestinian doctor, a house in West-Jerusalem is requisitioned by the Israeli government as &ldquo;vacant&rdquo;; rented to Jewish Algerian immigrants in 1956; purchased by a university professor who undertakes its transformation&hellip;</p>

<p>In 1887, Brazil is a young country. Its emperor, Dom Pedro II, is eager to see it develop. He gifts a piece of land, &ldquo; La Cecilia&rdquo;, to Giovanni Rossi, an Italian anarchist writer. Supported by nine companions and one woman, Olimpia, Rossi sets off to put his ideas of communal life into practice.</p>

<p>Three former political prisoners bear witness to the interrogations, and the psychological and physical torture they were subjected to. We see them and director Mehran Tamadon recreating Iranian prison cells in deserted Parisian warehouses. After an unhurried start, things start changing fast in this powerful reimagining that provokes strong emotions. Some of the men were unable to withstand their mistreatment, and painful memories are unleashed.</p> <p>Political activist Taghi Rahmani talks about the six months he spent in solitary confinement. Homa Kalhori, who later wrote A Coffin for the Living, explains the agony of &ldquo;the coffin.&rdquo; Businessman Mazyar Ebrahimi, who was falsely accused of spying by a competitor, ties the director to a torture bed to illustrate what happened to him.</p> <p>Where God Is Not captures all these events in an observational but engaged style that also includes the director and his own motives. Is he asking too much of the three former prisoners? Is he overly idealistic? These questions prompt intense discussions. This film, which won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury in Berlin, forms a diptych with My Worst Enemy, which is also being screened at IDFA this year.&nbsp;</p>

<p>Paris-based filmmaker Mehran Tamadon has not returned to his motherland of Iran after the authorities informed him he was no longer welcome, following the filming of his documentary film&nbsp;Iranian. A painful outcome&mdash;especially for someone whose work so explicitly aspires to inspire conversation.<br /> &nbsp;<br /> Searching for a way out of this deadlock, he characteristically chooses the path of dialogue.&nbsp;My Worst Enemy was filmed before the severe repression that followed the wave of 2022 protests. In the film, he asks exiled Iranian citizens to draw from their personal experiences with the Iranian authorities and interrogate him in an empty apartment in Paris.<br /> &nbsp;<br /> They know all the tricks used to force detainees to make false confessions, which in turn leads to pressing reflections on the validity of the system and whether anyone can be made into an offender. The stakes rise for Tamadon when one of the participants (actress Zar Emir Ebrahimi) questions the project herself.</p>

<p>1960 marked the end of the colonial empires across the African continent. France disappeared from the map, leaving behind the CFA Franc, a colonial creation, which is the name of the currency that still circulates in almost all of its former territories south of the Sahara. How does it come, those countries, once they regained their freedom, never denounced this strange legacy? The film delves into a little-known story that started in the 19th century and continues to the present time.</p>

<p>The West Jerusalem building is no longer the microcosm it once was twenty five years ago. Its inhabitants dispersed, this common space has disintegrated, but remains both an emotional and physical center at heart of the Israeli-Palestinian situation. Concrete reality has transformed into scattered stories and memories.</p>

<p>I tried to tell a story without images through images, but I think I will never succeed because their story is outside of my story.</p>

<p>Virginia Woolf&rsquo;s 1928 novel&nbsp;<em>Orlando</em>&nbsp;is both historical anchor and hopeful North Star of writer and philosopher Paul B. Preciado&rsquo;s first film, a sweeping yet intimate documentary that takes a panoramic look at past and present trans lives. Preciado&rsquo;s literate, charming conceptual approach casts 26 trans and non-binary people as different versions and evocations of Woolf&rsquo;s famous gender nonconformist, using the book as a starting point to talk about both the social and metaphorical meanings of transness and how Woolf&rsquo;s reflections on the body untethered from both time and gender normativity remain radical.&nbsp;Fleet and visually inventive, Preciado&rsquo;s film is finally a robust polemical inquiry into contemporary trans personhood and political disenfranchisement that points the way toward a possible utopia. Winner of four prizes at the Berlin International Film Festival, including the Teddy Award.</p>

<p>French filmmaker Armel Hostiou discovers he has a double in Kinshasa. Someone has created a fake Facebook profile in his name to hustle aspiring actors. So Armel heads to Congo&rsquo;s vast capital to track him down, and there begins one of the wildest and most unpredictable films of the year. An elementally suspenseful and wildly entertaining detective story about a white filmmaker on foreign ground. But also a story which with hilarious self-irony and in one twist after another turns into a darker story about the internet, identities and post-colonial struggles in the 21st century. Armel is helped by a group of young local artists who approach the doppelganger mystery with a casual coolness far from that of their European guest. But every time you think the mystery is solved, THE OTHER PROFILE takes a new turn. For as an elderly fisherman says to Armel around a campfire in the middle of the night, in a chilling scene that makes the little hairs stand up, &lsquo;If you&rsquo;re looking for the fake, search inside yourself.&rsquo;</p>

<p>In the summer 2021, an exceptional heatwave and drought led to giant fires that ravaged 19 million hectares of land in northeastern Siberia. In this region at the heart of the taiga lies the village of Shologon soon to be blanketed by a thick cloud of smoke. Spread by the wind, the black ashes carry alarming news: the forest is on fire and the flames are fast approaching. The government having left them to fend for themselves, the inhabitants must rally to fight The Dragon.</p>

<p>Paris 1943. Hitler set up the systematic looting of works of art in France. Rose Valland, infiltrated as intendant at the Jeu de Paume museum, which has become the sorting station for works leaving for Germany, will take all the risks to oppose this spoliation enterprise.</p>

<p>I&rsquo;ve been going regularly to Tijuana for over 15 years and, there, I always encounter the ghostly silhouettes of women who haunt the place. I call them &ldquo;the white ladies&rdquo;.</p>

<p>&ldquo;If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian&rdquo;. Sir Paul Mac Cartney</p> <p>Should we be outraged by one of the largest open-air slaughterhouses in the world?</p> <p>Every year, hundreds of pilot whales are hunted in the fjords of the Faroe Islands. It&rsquo;s locally known as the &ldquo;Grind&rdquo;, a spectacular and bloody tradition. International activists would like to put an end to it, so that these mammals will stop suffering. But the Faroese whalers denounce the hypocrisy of those who eat meat without looking at what is happening in slaughterhouses and at the industries polluting our planet. Using beautiful, haunting, and rare footage, &quot;A Taste of Whale&quot; relies on the specific circumstances of the Faroe Islands to reflect on a significant, global issue of our time. In presenting the perspectives of whalers and activists through four relatable and passionate characters the film invites the audience to bear witness to the &ldquo;Grind&rdquo; and to confront a practice too often taken for granted.</p>

<p>From images drawn from 125 years of cinema and left to speak for themselves, a new memory emerges that shows us our ambiguous, deep but often violent relationship with animals. Through this closeness, the film has us rediscover our own related destinies.</p>

<p>Two women on a lonely island off the coast of Nova Scotia: Sable Island. Conservationist Zoe Lucas was an art student when she came there for the first time in the 1970s and has been living on this remote strip of land for decades now, mostly alone. Director Jacquelyn Mills films Lucas on her daily trips around the island to observe the local flora and fauna. Her studies of Sable Island&rsquo;s population of wild horses, for which the island is famous, and of the biodiversity there in general have made the self-taught scientist an esteemed expert. Collecting the alarming amounts of plastic washing up also forms part of Lucas&rsquo;s everyday life. Mills films on 16 mm, which lends a special beauty to the barren landscape. Science and art fuse in the two women&rsquo;s activities, each enriching the other. The movements of beetles are made into music. Horse manure provides useful data for Lucas and is just as useful for Mills&rsquo;s experiments in film exposure and developing, along with algae and other vegetation. When Mills loads the final film reel into her camera, it is not just the shoot that is coming to an end, but also a special encounter between two people. A twinge of melancholy is unavoidable.</p>

<p>After the largest mining dam breaks in history, further dam collapses threaten millions in Brazil. A state counselor confronts the government's modus operandi, while dam refugees resist the mining companies' abuses in their threatened communities.</p>

<p>In the Colombian Amazon lies the mythical &ldquo;river of seven colors&ldquo;. The young Oscar, Do&ntilde;a Mar&iacute;a and the Indian Sabino live peacefully there in communion with nature. Yet, this area, once preserved due to the conflict with the FARC, is today a victim of its beauty and threatened by the arrival of new visitors.</p>

<p>The Tara is a river on the outskirts of Taranto whose waters are believed to have healing properties; bathing there is a tradition for the inhabitants of the city. Starting from this bucolic place, Volker Sattel and Francesca Bertin take us on a journey through a territory where myths clash with reality and where so-called &ldquo;progress&rdquo; has taken a heavy toll on nature and society.</p>

<p>In a farm amidst the French Alps, Jean-Philippe Valla, a farmer, develops energy and food self-sufficiency techniques. Julie Desprairies, a choreographer, works there with her team. Farming gestures and dance gestures merge as the agricultural and the choreography works seek a fairer way to inhabit the world.</p>

<p>Sylvain is a farmer. His fields, in line with the glysophated trend, surround the small island of greenery where my old but valiant mother has lived for decades. Two visions of agriculture, landscape and the world unfold in reality and in music.</p>

<p>Captured from my street corner during some urban adventures, images of Algiers, where as a child, after Algerian independence, I learnt about liberty. Off-screen words glide over the city, revealing the present and reviving history. (F.P.)</p>

<p>The conquest that led to the destruction of part of the Algerian population, its culture and its civilisation. From 1830 to 1848, what some famous, and less famous figures of 19th-century France said and wrote is contrasted with recent images of these two countries, these two worlds. (F.P.)</p>

<p>I spent six months in Guinea (Conakry) between February and July 1986; shooting alone in Super8, I filmed elements of people&rsquo;s lives and fragments of my own. (F.P.)</p>

<p>A young gay man falls head over heels in love with an Algerian labourer he meets in transvestite bar where he is a regular.</p>

<p>Forty years after the first edition of the Pan-African Festival of Algiers came the second edition in July 2009; I filmed several dance troupes rehearsing and performing; the dancers&rsquo; levitated bodies, the energy, grace and life that emanated from them. (F.P.)</p>

<p>Ren&eacute; Sch&eacute;rer, who calls himself Professor Hairibus, is a philosopher, professor emeritus at the University of Paris 8, and author of many works. His philosophy is not couched in an esoteric language, it can be practised by children, women, blacks, farmers, the elderly, geese, and even adults. (F.P.)</p>

<p>A wealthy man falls in love with a transvestite stripper and gives her the wherewithal to fulfil her dreams; she invents stories with her transvestite friends; the story with the rich guy ends badly and she goes back to work on the streets (with no regrets). (F.P.)</p>

<p>Lunettes (glasses) and Myope (myopic) present two ways of resisting the world. Identical and opposites, twins and adversaries, these two girls form a single character. Encouraged by Lunettes, Myope brings to life two characters, two relays, in the same city but in another dimension: Pierrot and Agathe. (F.P.)</p>

<p>Based on the poem by Constantine Cavafy : &ldquo;Return often, and take me, beloved sensation&rdquo;&hellip; Between Syria and Paris, a filmed love story without lovers. &hellip; &ldquo;at night when the lips and the skin remember.&rdquo;(F.P.)</p>

<p>This takes place at, in, under, through the gashes of Beirut, in the dust of what remained of the city in 1995 &ndash; before the city centre, destroyed by the war, was razed and rebuilt. (F.P.)</p>

<p>Communicate despite misunderstandings, caress violence and sometimes get bitten, try to control death and survive in the face of irremediable loss&hellip; The contradictory forces in our society and in all human beings.</p>

<p>Surrounded by his drawings, papers, photos and figurines, a man loses touch with reality as he remembers an aggression he experienced.</p>

<p>Ron Coleman and Karen Taylor invite into their home people who hear invasive voices that comment on their thoughts and daily actions. They discuss together what impact these voices have on their lives and social identities, but they also converse directly with the voices in order to pin them down.</p>

<p>Sitting in front of his computer, a man asks puppets how the book he is finishing will be appreciated &ndash; a book telling his own story of his transition from psychotic to caregiver.</p>

<p>A woman creates collages with the words she identifies in the voices of her mother that she hears in her head. She struggles to make sense of them.</p>

<p>A homeless man films and deforms his tattooed face, melting into his pixelated universe. Two young fire safety officers patrol a hospital, winding their way through a maze of underground corridors full of strange noises. They fight their fear thanks to fraternity, shared sorrows and the search for meaning.</p>

<p>On a Brazilian beach, two teenagers from the favelas talk about the joys and violence of their everyday life.</p>

<p>In Bangkok, the training and combats of child boxers, where domination and money are the driving forces. Three excerpts from an unfinished film.</p>

<p>Based on the miraculous story of a man who crossed a minefield and survived &ndash; the experience of boxers, mine clearance experts and warriors underpins this exploration of how conflict is perceived, managed and represented.</p>

<p>To prepare his conference, a man explains to his partner the words and phrases that he hears in the rain beating against the window, in the birdsong and the wood snapping under his feet.</p>

<p>Two youngsters turn a game into a lesson on martial arts techniques in a fight that takes the form of a minimalistic cinematic duel.</p>

<p>A former &ldquo;strongman&rdquo; (a power force athlete) from Finland, now working as an actor, has transformed his basement into a home cinema. In order to land the roles he wants, he trains intensively and stops at nothing to prove his commitment to fulfilling what the filmmakers expect of him.</p>

<p>During a power sports contest at a large hotel complex, one of the competitors oversteps his physical limits and collapses. In a suspended time where the whole team attempts to resuscitate him, another drama is being played out.</p>

<p>An original portrait of a mentally handicapped man in his environment &ndash; an employment rehabilitation centre. In his particular relationship to the camera, Yves exists in a time and in a rapport with the world that are inaccessible to us but which challenge ours.</p>

<p>A triptych on the forces driving violence in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro: teenagers who describe themselves as being &ldquo;on the right side of a wicked life&rdquo;; exterminators who uproot evil, and a former preacher turned gang leader who is convinced he will be redeemed by &ldquo;God&rsquo;s justice&rdquo;.</p>

<p>Federal Airlines daredevil pilot Dizzy Davis fakes a heart attack so he doesn&rsquo;t miss a date. His replacement is the victim of a fatal accident. Dizzy will try to redeem himself by carrying out a suicide mission for the company.</p>

<p>The child Ernesto doesn&rsquo;t want to go to school any more because, as he says, all he is taught there is things he doesn&rsquo;t know.</p>

<p>A small office worker lives in the suburbs of Tokyo with his family. Seeing their father bowing to his boss, his two boys ask him why he is doing this. Faced with his unsatisfactory response, the two boys then begin a hunger strike&hellip;</p>

<p>Little Lady lives with her sick mother in a suburb of New York. Her lover, a penniless young musician, goes to seek his fortune on the other side of town, the victim alone with the thugs of Pig Alley&hellip;</p>

<p>The daily life of a Samoan street gang in Long Beach, California, with its own rules based on violence, solidarity and rituals to strengthen cohesion.</p>

<p>Gracie and Ginny are twin sisters from San Diego who speak unlike anyone else. Living mostly cut off from the outside world, the two young girls have created their own private language, which is an amalgam of the English and German that they hear at home.</p>

<p>What do a for model-train hobbyists and the legendary film critic and painter Manny Farber have in common? The desire to recreate the past (the elaborate miniature worlds of the locomotive aficionados, Farber&rsquo;s prolific canvases)?</p>

<p>A free interpretation of the trial of the Chicago Eight where Judge Hoffman, now Judge Himmler, scribbles his notes on Playboys, where the defendants portray figures of the French Revolution and where Godard and Gorin, playing Lenin and Karl Rosa, discuss politics and cinema.</p>

<p>A choir boy torn between his commitments to the Spanish and to his compatriots, a teenager under growing pressure from the revolution, an actor seeking to free himself from his troubled soul: through these characters, in the 1980s, Philippines&rsquo; bloody emancipation from Spanish control.</p>

<p>A character at three different moments of his life: a member of a commune on a small Estonian island, a hermit in the solitude of northern Finland, and a singer in a neo-pagan black metal band in Norway.</p>

<p>A man with no ties, the survivor of a long odyssey, gathers scattered pieces of an identity that is as fragmented as the territories he travels through. He exhausts himself in the strangeness of signs, places, unfathomable languages. There is no god or indulgence in his nights, but the acceptance that all that exists is flesh.</p>

<p>From his father, Pierre inherited a wood that he looks after and, in the middle of the wood, a cabin, his father&rsquo;s old hunting lodge where Pierre now enjoys spending time alone with his dog. There, he made a film which he has just completed, twelve years after an unsuccessful attempt. One of the first shots shows the cabin from a steep high-angle view as if seen from the top of one of the trees bordering the glade. More than Thoreau&rsquo;s cabin, this shot brings to mind Edison&rsquo;s Black Maria studio. Like the house in Vattetot, the wood cabin is a film studio. And a haunted house.</p>

<p>A group of youngsters are drinking and dancing in an apartment. The socialist victory in the 1982 elections is announced and the attempted coup d&rsquo;&eacute;tat of 1981 seems far away. But a black hole that will devour everything in its path is approaching at great speed.</p>

<p>An ethnographic exploration of the work and daily life of non-player characters, the digital extras in video games. Their labor loops, activity patterns as well as bugs and malfunctions paint a vivid analogy for work under capitalism.</p>

<p>In the Paris metro, a man in a black mask. An anti-vax demonstration passes before the indifferent camera. The man returns home, the sound of social anger follows him inside, but nothing seems to matter except his interaction with the double he finds between the white walls. The curve of his shaved head matches that of the sculpture placed behind him on the mantelpiece. Portraits appear behind his back. Elsewhere, on the banks of the Seine, a woman and a dog gaze into the distance, as if watching for an event. Pierre Creton&#39;s adaptation of Maupassant&#39;s short story astonishes with its luminous serenity. This is because it is above all a portrait, a black-and-white study of a body, a face, of their clear and opaque beauty. Paying attention to them is enough to ward off ghosts and madness</p>

<p>A 2021 documentary written and directed by Pierre Creton. The film screened at 3 festivals, including Viennale &amp; FIDMarseille.</p>

<p>42 workers take their lunch break in a corridor that stretches the entire length of a shipyard. What was a brief interval in their work day expands into a sustained gaze.</p>

<p><em>In 2018, an incel (i.e., an involuntary celibate) posts a suicide note on the Reddit platform with the title &quot;America is responsible for my death.&quot; The Mechanics of fluids is an attempt to find answers to his words. A virtual drift on the Internet in search of his digital traces that ends up being an inner journey between two connected solitudes.</em></p>

<p>In a hotel overlooking the Mekong River, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and his team are rehearsing for a film about a meeting on a hotel terrace on the banks of the Mekong between Phon, and young girl, and Tong, a young man. The young girl discovers the existence of cannibalistic ghosts known as &ldquo;pobs&rdquo;.</p>

<p>The 18th-century miniaturist painter Nainsukh and his prince&rsquo;s court come to life in the abandoned palaces and landscapes of today&rsquo;s Kangra Valley. The actor playing Nainsukh is himself a miniaturist and continues the gestures of the past.</p>

<p>As a storm approaches, the creeping hand of history disrupts nature and civility in the Hudson River regions of Upstate New York.</p>

<p>From the earliest voyagers who navigated by starlight to the discovery of habitable planets by astronomers, Rock Bottom Riser examines the all-encompassing encounters of an island world at sea. As lava continues to flow from the earth&rsquo;s core on the island of Hawaii&mdash;posing an imminent danger&mdash;a crisis mounts. Astronomers plan to build the world&rsquo;s largest telescope on Hawaii&rsquo;s most sacred and revered mountain, Mauna Kea. Based on ancient Polynesian navigation, the arrival of Christian missionaries, and the observatory&rsquo;s ability to capture the origins of the universe, Rock Bottom Riser surveys the influence of settler colonialism, the search for intelligent life, and the discovery of new worlds as we peer into our own planet&rsquo;s&nbsp;existence.&nbsp;</p>

<p>In 1969, Robert Kramer travels to North Vietnam. Out of this trip came his film, People&rsquo;s War. In 1992, he returns to run a film workshop in Hanoi. Starting Place is the result of a reflection on the past, a reunion with the interpreter and cameraman he worked with in 1969, and meetings with Vietnamese people he knew back then.</p>

<p>An old lady, a boy and a dog. They roam the streets, pushing their little truck so as to glean cardboard and papers. They only return home when the city is asleep.</p>

<p>Mme Bua has suffered from epilepsy ever since she was tortured during the war. In the evening, she gathers with her neighbours to drink tea, sings songs of resistance and tell stories that now belong to their collective memory.</p>

<p>The evolution and transformation of Vietnam as seen through the life of the building where the director was born and that of its inhabitants.</p>

<p>How the Vietnamese government decides to modernise and construct vast tourist resorts across the whole coastal area of the Quang Nam farming region, forcing the farmers to leave their land.</p>

<p>The construction of a dam has forced the resettlement of a village located in Vietnam&rsquo;s central highlands and inhabited by the Katu ethnic minority. Today the land of their ancestors has been submerged by the waters of an artificial lake. Characters from three generations embody the fate of this community.</p>

<p>Hanoi, in the Japanese industrial zone: young women who have left their village struggle to escape temporary work and short-term contracts. Becoming a real worker is a dream, which should be a source of pride and a guarantee of dignity.</p>

<p>Several families living on an island in the M&eacute;kong Delta have chosen to develop a tourist area built on a community-based model. Each person has their role to play in making a success of the project by acquiring new skills. But this success stirs up envy.</p>

<p>The grandfather tries to explain the family history, the traditions, privileges and duties of the eldest son to his grandson, who agrees to stay on in the village, unlike others of his generation who have left for the city.</p>

<p>The portrait of a painting student at the Hanoi Fine Arts School who sells her paintings to tourists.</p>

<p>Nhi, a film school student expresses her doubts and wonders about her future during the final days of her preparation for her graduation film.</p>

<p>A young disabled man becomes passionate about soccer and inspires his friends with his courage and strong will. His mother reveals the causes of his handicap. The history of the war resurfaces.</p>

<p>In an old district of Hanoi, formerly a village, new loud speakers must be repaired and installed. The animation caused by this event plunges us into the heart of Vietnamese contradictions.</p>

<p>In a village in the centre of Vietnam, a farmer is also the master of ceremonies at funerals. He sings to accompany the dead on their journey to heaven.</p>

<p>For centuries, along the Mekong river, the brick kilns in Mang This used to be the symbol of the delta&rsquo;s economic prosperity. Now, the last brick kilns finally come to an end.</p>

<p>The father and mother of a young boy are both motorcycle taxi-drivers. The boy often finds himself at home all alone in the family&rsquo;s one-roomed apartment.</p>

<p>At the age of 13, Hận left his family to work on the River Mekong. He has held a variety of jobs and his life is written like a chronicle that flows with the river.</p>

<p>Di is a 12-year-old girl from the mist-shrouded mountains of northern Vietnam. She belongs to the Hmong, an ethnic minority in which girls get married at a very young age. This is often preceded by a controversial &ldquo;bride-kidnapping,&rdquo; where the girl is abducted by her future husband on Lunar New Year Celebration. Negotiations between the families follow.</p> <p>This also happened to Di&rsquo;s sister and their mother, so it doesn&rsquo;t seem strange that in preparation the women and girls discuss sex and married life without embarrassment. But Di also goes to school, where she learns very different values. And in her own way, even Di&rsquo;s mother tries to warn her daughter about child marriage.</p> <p>Director Diem Ha Le tells a story about the clash between ancient customs and modern values, in a place where children from a traditional culture also have access to the outside world. Her first full-length documentary is a moving film about the challenges faced by a young Hmong girl, but above all is about a teenager with a strong character, and who is not just a victim.</p>

<p>Where does theater begin, where does life end? The endearing Madame Phung and her transvestite singers criss-cross Vietnam, arousing fascination and hostility among the locals.</p>

<p>Phong has always seen himself as a girl trapped in a boy&rsquo;s body. When he enters Hanoi University, he discovers that he is not the only one suffering from this situation. Camera in hand, Phong decides to change his life and embarks on a metamorphosis.</p>

<p>Hanoi, Vietnam. Pomelo neighborhood must be razed to the ground to build a new ring road. Several groups of migrant workers coming from rural provinces are struggling to make a living from the demolition.</p>

<p>The screen is black, voices resonate, women&rsquo;s, men&rsquo;s voices, of all ages, seemingly American. The sound track of INFINITE DISTANCES is composed of found sounds, recorded on answer machines, to which the filmmaker has refrained from adding images. What we hear is already sufficiently telling: these snippets enable us to imagine both the person speaking and the intended recipient of the message, their relationship and respective states. Is the recipient really unavailable or is he or she waiting patiently beside the phone? Is the speaker sober and sound of mind? For want of images, the time period is even difficult to identify. Absent this information, all we can do is to focus our attention on everything a voice can express, beyond the words themselves &ndash; the thousand ways of saying &ldquo;hi&rdquo; or &ldquo;call me back&rdquo;. The film surveys an emotional spectrum, from degree zero (a computer voice reminding someone of a medical appointment) to the peak of intensity (the rage against a man who is not answering the phone), as well as functional or pointless, coded or sung messages. The delight procured by this concentrate of humanity culminates when emotions and intentions intermingle &ndash; desire tinged with reproach, an attack followed by a polite invitation. Whether speaking to Judy, Rob or Carrie, each caller in their solitude expresses a desire to keep in touch, which often goes further than the scope of their own shared relationship (several messages convey concerns for a third person). We can wager that these messages, interspersed with unanswered questions, will have a particular echo in a dark room that brings together individual existences.</p>

<p>In a Parisian hospital, Claire Simon films a ward where destinies intersect: abortion, endometriosis, assisted reproduction, maternity, gender transition, cancer... There, she collects the stories of these individuals, their hopes, their desires, but also their fears.&nbsp;This film follows doctors and patients at a gynecology ward in France.&nbsp;</p> <pre> &nbsp;</pre>