Cinéma du Réel 2022

There is a geography of miracles. Jonasz studies insects and fishes, Signe leaves and herbs. After a day spent in gardens and libraries, they meet, take the train and leave the city, pitching their tent on the shores of a lake. As they read, eat fruit, wander the forest and swim in the cold water, the outside world feels further and further away. A stranger appears and a trio is formed. But there are also other trios, other lakes, different places, different times.

The perfect automation of a greenhouse where the fruit is checked and sorted using machinery. Human presence serves to fix where the machine fails — straightening the crooked, planting the delicate, and tending to the machine, unable to take care of itself.

The film depicts the lives of the two sole residents of an abandoned company town while unfolding a complex labour history and revealing the vestiges of environmental degradation. Combining large format cinematography and an inquiry into the archival record, it interlaces past and present. In the 35 and 65mm images, a post-industrial landscape appears to us in splendid desolation. A man on a quadbike drives around, apparently alone in this lunar setting. But soon microfilm documents unscroll on an image viewer. We can make out articles and reports mentioning a copper mine and the pollution created by the metal working. Then voices bear witness, old recordings or letters read by an actor. In places and archives, Ryan Ermacora and Jessica Johnson collect traces. This singular, albeit commonplace, story of a territory colonised, exploited then abandoned is reconstituted in fragments: the town of Anyox was built to house the mining company's employees until the industry collapsed, leaving behind a barren land on which massive slag heaps resemble black dunes. Using documents passed down by those who once spent time there, a political story takes shape: faced with a series of pay cuts, the workers launched a strike that was severely crushed, leading to the arrest and expulsion of many foreign workers. The discoloured landscape then appears as a memorial to human, animal and vegetal lives. Lives trapped between economic forces and state institutions driven by a common interest, far-removed from that of people and nature. The stranded solitary man could well be the last man on Earth.

The mother of writer Félix Bruzzone disappeared in 1976 from Campo de Mayo, one of the main clandestine detention centers of the then established Argentinian dictatorship. Today, it is one of the largest military units in the country. Bruzzone is determined to find someone to help him explore this space, a symbol of a very particular and also collective pain — his experiences inspire Jonathan Perel, who accompanies him.

Three men are working on a construction site. The work has been interrupted by five months of imprisonment. The rain suddenly falls like the silence that precedes an eviction.

A miniature homage to Chantal Akerman, conceived as a series of playfully impossible letters that respond to her inquiry about renting my sister's home in Mexico City.

Devil's Peak reflects on recent unprecedented shifts in the socio-cultural fabric of the artist's homeland of Hong Kong and a nagging anxiety that hangs over daily life in the former British Colony. Highly condensed glimpses of cityscapes and everyday life form a collage of overlapping poetic narratives and coded references. The film cycles through ominous sites of social tension, lush urban spectacle, relics of imperialist legacies, and places of personal significance—such as the artist's 500-year-old ancestral village—at a rapid, frenetic pace. By interrogating highly subjective experiences in the context of a seemingly insurmountable change in the political and cultural fabric of his native city, Liu creates a site of remembrance for a time and place that may never be as it was.

Léa tells the story of the Gasolineiras de Kebradas as it echoes through the walls of Colmeia, the women's prison of Brasilia: "In 2019, I got involved with my sister Chitara in this crazy scheme she was caught up in. She had bought some land in a favela—oil pipes ran right under it, so she built this huge structure, tapped the oil, and started refining it right there and was making a lot of money. She set up a deal with the motoboys, so they would buy gas from her. She also had a stand at the market where she would sell it. Chitara also got mixed up in politics. She made history."

"Stretching and blurring the boundaries of video essay, experimental film and home movie, traces of a 1950's homemade melodrama by amateur filmmaker Joan Thurber Baldwin intermingle with a mournful homage to the author's granmother and her vacated home. A powerful mélange of cinematic and domestic spaces, part and present." – Kevin B Lee

Huahua, an eccentric and exuberant woman from Xiongan New Area, livestreams herself dancing, singing, a,d chatting with fans for a living. Cell phone screens, beauty filters, and digital soundscapes reveal a world that Huahua creates with her own image.

Lago Gatún is a journey traveling south to north through the Panama Canal.

In 1990, Vytautas Landsbergis, the charismatic leader of the independence movement in Lithuania, successfully wrested his country away from the USSR and compelled Gorbachev to recognise its sovereignty. The ambition and precision of one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers—and impressive archival footage—match the scale of this historic moment and struggle.

Josephine Mutzenbacher or The Story of a Viennese Whore, as Told by Herself is an erotic account written in 1906. Staging a casting for a fictitious adaptation of the book, the acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ruth Beckermann asks men of all ages to read extracts of this scandalous book. The result is a witty, thought-provoking glimpse into how society shapes our eroticism.

When you're a student and you live far from your parents, friends are family. Friends study together, eat together, share everything and have no secrets, almost believing it will always be that way. But life has other plans, and the University of Bangui, in the Central African Republic, is just a synecdoche for a weary country.

The repetitive nature of a middle-aged man's daily commute home proves to be quietly revelatory.
In suburban Melbourne, Andrew, a charming middle-aged legal worker, leaves the office and drives home punctually at 5pm daily. During the long rush-hour commute, he dutifully calls to check in on his mother who has dementia, and after that shares a casual chat with his wife. At times, a colleague hitches a ride back, and the two develop a friendship through conversations about family, work, anxieties, love and mortality.
Unfolding over the course of a year, this naturalistic docudrama with improvised dialogue takes place almost entirely in a car, with us tucked voyeuristically in the backseat. As we watch the light and seasons change outside, a deeply human portrait of a man gradually reveals itself.

A tale of disaster, both natural and social. A sweeping chorus of ecstasy and dread uses found footage to overlap two great perils of our time: the external degradation of our earthy landscape, and the hollowing out of our internal landscapes through inane and omnipresent media. But when an earthquake brings two men into each other's arms, the possibility of love in the face of trauma is revealed.

The Chens are an Amis family on Taiwan's eastern coast. As some family members venture into the brush after a midnight rain, others harvest rice amid the whir of machinery. Blending work and play, food becomes a site for the Chens to pass down their endangered language to a younger generation, trade ghost stories, and express the vibrant hybridity of contemporary indigenous identity.

An actress and a filmmaker rehearse a film script. It gathers fragments from the diary that María Dolores González Katarain, Yoyes, wrote during her exile in Mexico between 1980 and 1985, right after she quit ETA, the armed organization she had led for some time.

"A view of the United States of America from a mid-COVID perspective, with references to some of my prior films, along with past political and social citations. The film was inspired by a 2020 Criterion Channel showing of The United States of America, a 25-minute, 16mm film, made together with Bette Gordon in 1975." — James Benning

A European artist writes about his experience in portraying life in Brazil during the colonial period. A doorman watches the images of the security cameras, while reflecting on the relationship with his employers. Everything seems to be in its place. Until the images of the European artist emerge, and with them all the nightmares of a country's past.

Jean lives as a hermit in a forest. From his cabin, he listens to and records the sounds of the animals that inhabit the surrounding area. One night, he hears the cry of an unknown animal. Along with Mana, a young girl who sings with the birds, he goes in search of the mysterious creature.

I meet Pierrot in the fall of 2018. We demonstrate together in the heart of the Yellow Vests movement. The earth trembles and so do our hearts. Our bodies mingles with thousands of others who express their anger in the street every Saturday.

The French-Italian border at the Montgenèvre pass. Daytime reality: tourism, capital invested to make the mountain profitable. At night: the fragile destiny of more than ten thousand men, women and children who, in four years, risked their lives to cross the border.

Based on rare archives, the exemplary adventure of Somankidi Coura – an agricultural cooperative founded in Mali in 1977 by West African immigrant workers living in workers' accommodation in France – sheds light on the violence of colonial agriculture and the ecological challenges in Africa today.

"Is it true that one can keep a young woman through writing? A long correspondence of 149 letters, this film is based on the letters that my brother Didier wrote to me. It explores how writing and the experience of a hybrid language create a film about love."

As a result of a pandemic, Ico Costa leaves a camera with Ailucha and Domy. What we see is their daily life in Inhambane, where these young Mozambicans live their youth.

Manon has been a defendant in the Tarnac case for ten years, accused with eight other people of participating in a terrorist undertaking while sabotaging high-speed lines in France. As their trial approaches, I'm taking my camera to join the group of women who helps Manon preparing her defense.

"[…] 'alles Nahe werde fern,' everything near becomes distant. Goethe was referring to the evening twilight. Everything near becomes distant. It is true. At nightfall, the things closest to us seem to move away from our eyes. So the visible world has moved away from my eyes, perhaps forever." Jorge Luis Borges, "Blindnes," in Seven Nights, New Directions, 1984, p. 1215. In 2006 my friend Xiaoxin caught an eye disease and, from that moment on, began losing his sight. By 2015 he had become completely blind. He told me that this complete darkness frightened him. I felt that my fried was en route somewhere. In the "land of the blind" Xiaoxin will live in a solitary world (a world without simulacra), a real world (we must touch), a poetic world (the collapsed statue)

One October evening in Paris, 1961. A man leaves his room to join a peaceful march for Algerian independence. A photograph reconstitutes the offscreen dimension of the event using fragments of a daily life in suspended time.

Images of a small boatyard, somewhere in Greece. Between the repairs and the boats' departures, a team of men haul them ashore and set them afloat again. A 16 mm film built around gestures and movements that oscillate between a toing and froing, attachment and detachment, tension and tenderness.

Composed of serious and funny musical scenes, an exploration of the virtues of translation and desire for communication between humans and birds. Told by a narrator from the future, after the sixth mass extinction, an observation of the attempts made to establish a possible exchange.

The destruction of the block of buildings named Gentianes in 2011 records the beginning of a new era for the Mourinoux neighborhood and its inhabitants. Il they have to leave, where can they go? How to get there? Memories are shared and other places are imagined as conversations take place between a few young men born in the 1990.

Michel Jouvet, known worldwide since 1959 for his discovery of paradoxical sleep, dives in the twilight of his life in his notebooks of dreams, drawings and research. An abundant material which gradually animates an intimate portrait of this neurobiologist, oneirologist convinced that the dreams are the guardians of the singularity of our identity.

They claimed to be "men of honour". In reality, they were killers in the Cosa Nostra (Sicily). Arrested in the early 1990s, they chose to work with the Italian justice and obtained the status of "cooperative witness". Three of them tell their story: how they joined the mafia, what they experienced, why they decided to betray the organisation and get out. And in doing so, they bear witness to the "mafioso way of being".

We went to research the conditions of the students in the guerrilla schools in the mangroves. Instead, we soon became ourselves the learners and the first lesson was how to walk. In the mangrove school the learning happens with the whole body.

After having long dreamed of a life made up of great love stories and epic feelings, my mother's mother settled alone in a house where she says she has never been happier, enjoying an affair with nature who at least doesn't tell her when it's uncommitted.

December 1919, The American government deports 249 anarchists and radicals on the "Soviet Ark". Five years later, this same ship becomes the decor of Buster Keaton's slapstick comedy The Navigator.

Off Power starts with an urban development analysis of Hong Kong Island though the lens of its electric infrastructure. But the documentary-like tone slowly shifts to science-fiction. A mysterious phenomenon forces its electricity supply to be cut off. Therefore, Hong Kong is plunged into total darkness.

The Semperit plant in Argenteuil. Faced with the molten rubber, bodies engage with the cogs of the machines. The hammer drops: off-shoring. Then a symphony pursues the account: rising from the destruction of the machines, of the walls… and of a surprising community.

"You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet." Without realising it, Jean-Claude Rousseau carries out the existential instructions, which Kafka delivered as aphorism no. 109 sometime between September 1917 and April 1918, when he was staying on a farm with his sister Ottla and her husband in Siřem (Zürau) in North-West Bohemia.

Rome, years of lead. Aldo Moro is kidnapped in the fervor of the Red Brigades. The armed struggle is propelled towards a political dead end. Alvin Curran, mythical figure of the musical Avant-Garde, strives to dissolve the figure of the author in the collective. The notion of instruments is extended to natural and everyday objects, producing revolutionary works.

Two pigeons grow on my balcony, while my love story wanes. I leave Athens, and through Jacques and Margaux, discover other relationships to birds and love.

I'm tired of playing the cowboy. But by cheating, it is possible to slip past impassable mountains and bottomless rivers. Where no cowboy has ever gone before is a vast desert, filled with strange shapes and inexplicable phenomena. In this place, death is final, but it is possible to rewrite history to change the fatal outcome.

Maria is eight years old and she grew up in Ibiza, an ambiguous and sacred insular territory. She is preparing a ballet for her family, which will be performed on a day after a full moon night. For 40 years no child has been born in S'Estanyol, a small and rural land located near Jesùs village, in the south east of the island.

Here's a utopia, year 231. Which is more a clue, than a place or a film at which you'll look. You haven't given up on a world, have you ? You know traditional utopias are no place as ours will ever be: flags without masts. Here is some utopian weather forecast, to observe all of these outside atmospheres, add all you would to what is already here. (Freely inspired by the epilogue

Paris, early winter 2020. While some are forbidden to go out, some others are trapped outside. Two taggers are painting a graff against the new global security law on a motorway tunnel wall. They are interrupted by a resident of the area, who leads us to discover an underground

Retelling the story of my father's death is an attempt to fill a space full of gaps, to perceive life in inanimate things, to embody a disembodied figure, to populate an irreplaceable place, to speak the unspeakable.

On the day of the summer solstice, before the harvest, villagers gather to throw away their debris. At midnight, the pile is burned. Three women talk about what they would have liked to have disappeared in the fire.

From Lyon to Angoulême, from Angoulême to Paris, I filmed my year 2020. One second per day.

A group of friends decide to spend a day on the Ile du Frioul, opposite Marseille. They dive, they discuss, run, sing, it dances. They fall asleep around a fire … A shadow, noises. They take shelter in a boat, they tell each other repeated stories, of the village, of adults, of djins … and there they meet a strange woman … We immerse ourselves with them, close to dreams, and to an adult life that is still far but close.

Author of "Sunny Karukera, Stranded Guadeloupe" (1980), Elzéa Foule Aventurin engaged, in 2017, in a series of interviews with her granddaughter. Together they retrace, not without mischief, a family history, sailing from one end of the Black Atlantic to the other. A story made of silences, pride and revolt.

Under the viaduct which gives relief to the Route des Jeunes in Geneva, an epicenter of entertainment coexists with the dust which accumulates on abandoned vehicles. Depending on the day and time, there are skaters, hockey players, future bikers slaloming, or even young people enjoying their cars. Youth is part of the history of this road from its construction in 1942 until today.

Where is the front? who are we? Where are we going? García Márquez said: "The world is too new, there are many things that do not have names and must be pointed to." This is my first satisfying work since I came to France, I was lost for a while in this brand new country, I needed to learn a new language, a new way of life, everything new. I've lost part of my language ability, and I'm confused facing the front, I'm pointing there, my mouth is slurred. I make a sound (whistle) like a baby to describe the world. "There, there, there". Perhaps with a bit of self-deprecation. This is a performance work about the camera and the body, and my direct response to the city.

A "filmic ballad" in the heart of the city of Rio de Janeiro in which Angelica De Paula shares her daily life during the first lockdown. Her story and her songs evoke the domination and power relationships which materialize in bodies. It is in this form which they call "documentary dance" that Sacha Rey chooses to respond to the mutism of "necro-liberal" society which produces and makes invisible "sacrificable bodies" (F. Vergès).

Drawing on the threads of Virtual Currency and Digital Junk, Very, Very, Tremendously seeks to discuss how the acts of production and consumption from the virtual world interact systematically with reality, whilst also mirrors how the 'two realities' coexist in geopolitical conflict.

An engaging, personal film about the history of Cameroon. In the very first minutes we see scenes of the bloody riots from the years of the war of independence and subsequent dictatorship.
Filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno leads us through the various phases the country has undergone, posing critical questions and inviting fellow political journalists to contribute in their chosen medium, whether through the written word or photo reportage. The result is an explorative journey in which the director exposes the long-term effects of colonization in the realms of politics, culture and the media.
The combination of archive material, contemporary music, journalism, fiction and essay produces a refreshing perspective on the filmmaker's homeland. Underlying the investigative and occasionally humorous tone is an activist message: a nation that does not remember and honor its past can never have a future.

The seventies were the last Moroccan period in which struggles and dreams for change were a reality. Also known as "Years of Lead" this was the most important artistic and cultural period which shaped the first generation of Moroccan post-colonial artists.

Some call them "Arabs", others "niggers": in other words, "Arab niggers". In France, there are thousands of them. They carry out the most arduous and degrading work; they are poorly paid. Underpaid, so to say. Most of them live in what are commonly called slums, shantytowns.

Niger. Cabascabo, an African veteran of the French colonial army in Indochina, has returned to Niger. He has squandered his fortune on an easy life in Niamey. Now a simple labourer, he sees the episodes of his life pass by.

During the first Carnival celebrated after Independence, the Luanda and Benguela inhabitants are filmed between their workplaces and rehearsals of these popular festivities.

A group of filmmakers looking for a subject interviews young people from Casablanca about their expectations and relation to Moroccan cinema. When they witness a crime committed by a dock worker, who accidentally kills his boss, they decide to take a closer look at this individual case.

In three silent episodes, we see children destitute and alone, but also the games and resourcefulness that they deploy to survive and protect their dreams, in a world of adults that leaves no room for them.

Fad,Jal is a Serer village in Senegal. At the foot of breadfruit tree, the ancestor and a griot recount the village history to the children, and the difficulty of working the drought-stricken land. In parallel, the villagers' daily life is impacted by the government policy of taking over the land.

The primitive process of brick-making, the monotonous choreography of a nonetheless meaningful social task.

The early days of resistance in Angola in the 1960s. Domingos Xavier, an activist in the MPLA, the Angolan party fighting for national liberation, is wrenched from the arms of his wife by a troop of soldiers who take him to an unknown destination. His wife sets off on an exhausting march across the whole country in search of her husband.

In Africa, small crafts survive as a form of resistance to the invasion of consumer goods. Tracing the stages of producing handicraft items out of waste materials, the film reveals the destruction of the ecosystem and celebrates the ingenuity of these craftsmen for whom recycling is a vital need.

Following the popular uprising of October 2014, Burkina Faso launched a historic vote. The "Balai Citoyen" (Citizens' Broom) movement, a key actor in the revolt that forced former President Blaise Compaoré to flee the country, played its part as a driving force and guardian of genuine democracy.

Cairo, 25 January 2013: a spate of sexual aggressions takes place on Tahrir Square, the day of the second anniversary of the revolution. In response, a massive wave of angry women unfurls in the streets and Samaher Alqadi joins them without knowing where this story will lead her.

Gabon, Libreville 2016, Christ, a young boxer trains relentlessly by day and, at night, earns his living as best he can as a nightclub doorman. In parallel, another fight is playing out – that of the presidential election.

The Migrant House in Gao, Mali, is a refuge located on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. It welcomes people in transit to Algeria in the north, or on the way back after a failed attempt to reach Europe.

Twelve years in the life of Mehrez, a gifted dancer and actor but also addicted to gambling and horse-racing. He struggles with himself and with the bewildering contradictions of his country. In his relentless quest for truthful emotions, Mehrez defies all established rules.

A tiny courtyard, life between the walls of the penitentiary… Such is their daily life. But this cannot define them entirely. They are also young people with dreams. "Outside", everything seems violent, chaotic and limitless…

Every evening in a popular area of the city of Bobo-Dioulasso in Burkina Faso, Mrs. Coda welcomes the children of prostitutes at her home. The young women then stroll through the "Black", a lively alley in the city center, until daybreak when they come to pick up their babies.

After two years absence, Alassane Diago comes back to his village in Senegal's Futat region to try and understand how and why his mother has spent so many years waiting for the return of her husband, who went away to work elsewhere.

Deep in the Calais jungle, its blue exterior and straw roof are easy to spot. Designed to remind him of his homeland, the "blue house on the hill" is the work of Alpha, an artist who has been living in exile for many years.

Nnuba, meaning "each in turn" in the Tamazight language, is the name of a long-standing women's self-help organisation. Its objective is for each to take their turn in grazing the village cattle. Songs, confidences, poems, life stories, laughter and tears run through and accompany this pastoral activity.

Today I became a man like my father, I go to meet him to find out what has kept him abroad for so many years without sending us any news, without providing for his children, his wife, without coming home…

Boniface "Softie" Mwangi has long fought injustices in his country as a political activist. Now he's taking the next step by running for office in a regional Kenyan election. But running a clean campaign against corrupt opponents becomes increasingly harder to combat with idealism alone.

In their houses in the old medina of Casablanca, the women cook, clean the house, take care of their families and help each other. They also go to the market and the hammam, exchange gossip with their neighbors and discuss political events they have heard about on television.

Jean Genet spent the last ten years of his life in Larache, Morocco. He was buried in the Spanish cemetery facing the sea and the local prison. Dalila Ennadre, who died in May 2020, faithfully filmed the people who continue to visit the poet whose memory reigns over this sun-scorched place, and where they come to find some inner peace.

In Abidjan, "Rolex the Portuguese" and his companions aged 15 to 25 make their living off the informal economy, particularly from online "grazing" scams that exploit the largesse of white women yearning for love and strong sensations.

Mozambique gained independence from Portugal in 1975, following a bloody struggle that lasted more than a decade. In three acts (plus a poetic prologue and epilogue), some of those who lived through it tell their story about the struggle for independence.

Beyond My Steps follows the process of assembling the most recent performance by the only contemporary dance company in Angola. During the creation of the piece (Des)construction, the seven dancers are led to travel through a set of traditional Angolan dances and transform them by giving them new meanings.

In the Comoros, three female basketball players from the national team and their former coach manifest their resistance by choosing to live and build their future in a country undermined by precarity and exile. Basketball is a way of escape, but also of expressing and realising one's full potential.

Sally, a 23-year-old woman from an upper-class family, decides to engage in the communist struggle of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party. Her romantic ideals sweep her into the heart of the country's revolutionary fervour, propelling her to the top of the most wanted enemies of the State.

Two young Tunisians try to survive by working in the hay trade. Their day begins at the crack of dawn and never seems to end. With no alternative between unemployment and exploitation, the dreams of a carefree youth soon turn into despair.

The wastelands and crowded streets of an African country are traversed by a woman bearing a wooden cross on her back. A symbolic social-political voyage of a society, spiraling between religion, identity and collective memory.

The film traces the motives for the assassination of anti-Apartheid activist, Dulcie September and travels from the heart of Paris in March 1988 to the pursuit of justice in 2021, exposing layers of deceit, complicity, hidden agendas in the unsolved mystery of this murder.

As South Sudan hangs in the balance of a peace agreement, a mother and her two daughters return from exile. While the mother becomes central to a new government, her daughter's struggle to come to terms with what it means to call South Sudan home.

In Algiers' largest slaughterhouse, men live and work in a closed universe to the throbbing rhythms of their tasks and dreams. Hope, bitterness, love, football, paradise and hell tell their stories like the chaabi and rai melodies that set the tempo of their life and world.

"Abdoulaye Mamani, a militant and trade unionist, journalist, engaged writer, led a lifelong struggle for people's freedom and the independence of his country, Niger. Retracing the footsteps of my father, twenty-three years after his death, I gradually rediscover not only his story but also that of my country."

"Abdoulaye Mamani, a militant and trade unionist, journalist, engaged writer, led a lifelong struggle for people's freedom and the independence of his country, Niger. Retracing the footsteps of my father, twenty-three years after his death, I gradually rediscover not only his story but also that of my country."

When Karisa's grandmother is accused of witchcraft, he travels from Mombasa to her rural home to find out who's behind it. It turns out that the threatening letter his grandmother received came from a member of his own family.

Aida has to rebuild her whole life and no longer wants to look back. As she trudges from one poor neighbourhood to another, the revolution explodes. Driven by the determination to pull through and find a roof in Tunis for herself and her children, she persists regardless of the historic events unfolding around her.

The 20 July 2001, in Genoa, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets for the G8 Summit. Carlo Giuliani, a 23-year-old Italian peace activist lost his life there. The testimony of the young man's mother adds a counterpoint to the images of the demonstration and sheds a different light on events.

The families of small farmers have settled on the land belonging to a bankrupt sugarcane factory. They transform their camp into an island of agroecological development, political discussions, emancipation, and dream of self-determination and re-invention.

In the 2014 municipal elections, at Saillans in the Drôme department, a citizen electoral list carried the day based on the project for participatory democracy. Great hopes are kindled by this "Republic of Saillans". Five years later, as the next elections draw near, the village meets to make a first assessment of this political experiment.

In an Argentina divided between a deep conservatism and an unprecedented momentum in feminism, Claudia and Violeta, trans women who identify as transvestites, lead the fight with their comrades, convinced of their roles at the center of an ongoing revolution that intersects with so many struggles.

Residents reclaim the land at Notre-Dame-des-Landes – they have other visions for the future of their common territory, and their clash with the government.

Dressed in yellow vests, women and men have come together to express their anger and their determination to change the world. Tracing a line from Le Havre to Marseilles, behind the peaceful image of landscapes, serene nature and scenes of everyday life, anonymous voices emerge and answer each other.

In a Parisian cab, a man learns from a Moroccan fortune-teller that his sister is about to die. In an attempt to thwart the prediction, the brother embarks on a fictional journey between Morocco, Israel and Paris. Based on family archives and excerpts from the trilogy written and created by Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz, Cahiers Noirs invites us into the intimacy of a Jewish-Arab family. An imaginary story in which brother and sister revisit the past and present to defy an inexorable future. But the shadow of the prophecy always looms large, in life as in the movies.

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 "bride-kidnapping," where the girl is abducted by her future husband on Lunar New Year Celebration. Negotiations between the families follow.
This also happened to Di's sister and their mother, so it doesn'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's mother tries to warn her daughter about child marriage.
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.

One of the most important contemporary writers invites us on a personal stroll through the past he has come to terms with in his autobiographical novels. Class, culture, sexuality, identity and education: Édouard Louis speaks from experience.

Ten years ago, Emmanuelle, a French teacher in a high-school in the northern suburbs of Marseille, took part in a film with her students. Based on their class study of The Princess of Cleves, the film hears them express their dreams, desires and fears. Today what remains of their hopes of liberty, equality and fraternity?

From the first moments, there can be no doubt that this is a Rithy Panh film. His signature is unmistakable—we recognize the handmade, static figures and dioramas from The Missing Picture (2013), the first Cambodian film to be nominated for an Oscar. And as in Irradiated (2020), Panh bombards the viewer with the horrors of the 20th century. Everything Will Be OK is a dystopian vision à la Animal Farm and Planet of the Apes, with nightmarish sound design and a poetically political commentary.
In a near future, during a pandemic, the animals have taken over. They treat humans in a way they learned from humans themselves, as we see through sometimes disturbing archive footage—from dictators like Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot; from the horrors of factory farming, which we see repeated on countless screens. Panh overlays this with cinematic references alluding to film classics such as 2001 and Metropolis. The ironic title cites the T-shirt of democracy activist Kyal Sin, who was killed by Myanmar police in 2020.

A lecturer specialized in children's rights gives a presentation on the question of the age of criminal responsibility for Israeli citizens and for Palestinian nationals.

The first episode of France Culture and Ruth Zylberman's documentary series, directed by Julie Beressi.

A man digs his own grave and, and as though to keep him from it, the elements and beings quiver.

An account of the political egress from the last and oldest armed conflict in Western Europe. Acteurs, victims and peace negotiators plunge us into the history of a people who, in the face of violence, were able to invent a new path and act on their own destiny.

It took Arnaud des Pallières ten years to make POUSSIÈRES D'AMÉRIQUE (2011). A decade later, JOURNAL D'AMÉRIQUE has adopted the narrative system and historical scope of the previous work to create an essay film interweaving various anonymous, often private archive images and intertitles containing a mixture of reflection, speculation and poetry. The new work comprises fragments of images, texts and sounds written in the language of cinema which seem to hark back to a silent era that was nonetheless full of the noise of the world. Written from January to April of an undefined year, this diary is like "an old movie from the 20th century". Parables about fairies and sharks, fond memories and dreams of catching fish and collecting precious stones slowly turn into stories about wars, atom bombs, patriots and veterans, as well as about our alienated childhoods and the ghosts among us. While sparks of light and ideas burst onto the screen and in our minds at a thought-provoking pace, we are invited to meditate upon what the French filmmaker once liked to call "our old homeland".

When director Eugenio Polgovsky passed away in 2017, his sister Mara stepped in to assemble his surviving film footage into Malintzin 17, an absorbing documentary about nature, observation and the wonder of childhood.
A beautifully patterned Inca dove has made a nest on a power line overhanging the road in the unassuming and quietly affecting documentary Malintzin 17. As filmmaker Eugenio Polgovsky trains his camera on the bird from his Mexico City balcony, he uses it to gently prompt discussions with his five-year-old daughter, Milena, in what becomes a sensitive snapshot of parenthood. Constructed from footage shot over a week in 2016, the film has been assembled by his sister, Mara Polgovsky, after Eugenio suddenly passed away in 2017. Knowledge of this naturally influences how we understand the finished film, but it only serves to heighten the impact of this absorbing and serene work.

A collaborative work by the filmmakers An van. Dienderen (Belgium), Rosine Mbakam (Cameroon) and Éleonore Yameogo (Burkina Faso) that explores their different perspectives as filmmakers and their different experiences, as a result of their skin color. The film is divided into three parts, each of which is the responsibility of one of the directors, but the dialogue between the trio is made through recordings where they discuss opinions, conclusions and even lighting techniques.

Director Alain Gomis delves into the archives to show us a visit by Thelonious Monk, the American jazz composer and pianist known for his style of improvisation, to Paris in 1969. The starting point is a raw interview that Monk gives to French television and the clash with the stereotypes he encounters. The result is a candid, improvised mosaic portrait of the jazz master.

A meditative, four-movement docu-fiction that unfolds as a lyrical portrait of rural tragedy. Following the accidental death of a child by stray bullet during seasonal hay-burning, the film weaves together images of mourners, scorched earth, intimate faces, archive visuals, cremation rituals, and lingering embers—evoking grief, memory, and the threshold between life and death.

Immersive three part film from director Jonás Trueba, who captures the spirit of a group of teens in Spain in an empathic, compelling, and moving way. In 2016, Trueba asked the teens to participate in a five-year project, in which they recreated situations from their lives. They talk about their insecurities, wanting to be accepted, loneliness, and what they are supposed to do with their lives. They demonstrate against school privatisation, debate politics and, like many adults, worry about the planet's future.

For 12 years now, Mathieu Amalric has been filming the stupendous New York saxophonist and composer John Zorn. Whirligig films that Zorn likes to programme during his concerts, like a musical set. They are screened here for the first time out of a concert setting. Music in the making, constellations of energies, an ever-expanding universe of sound…

For 12 years now, Mathieu Amalric has been filming the stupendous New York saxophonist and composer John Zorn. Whirligig films that Zorn likes to programme during his concerts, like a musical set. They are screened here for the first time out of a concert setting.rnMusic in the making, constellations of energies, an ever-expanding universe of sound…

John Zorn is a musician whose restlessness drives his art. Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan joins Zorn, rehearsing his challenging song "Jumalattaret" with pianist Stephen Gosling. During these preparations, Zorn shows that perfection isn't necessary—it's the emotional connection that matters.