FIDMarseille 2024

102 Narra

Rafael Manuel Tatjana Fanny

Daily life unfolds in a gated community of Manila amidst birdsong, effigies of the Holy Family, lush greenery and the intricacies of class. Rafael Manuel, alongside co-director Tatjana Fanny, casts an intimate gaze on his own childhood home which oscillates between personal and political, offering a tender yet piercing view into social and familial structures in the Philippines.
– Leonie Woodfin

A Fidai Film

Kamal Aljafari

In the summer of 1982, the Israeli army invaded Beirut and took advantage of the opportunity to seize the archives of the Palestinian Research Center. These archives contained many historical documents on Palestine, including a rich collection of photographs and films. These images have since been renamed and re-indexed according to the vision of their new custodians, the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Against these acts of dispossession and appropriation (one sequence shows the quiet violence of their authors), A Fidai Film offers a counter-narrative based on this loss, in order to restore the traces of the plundered Palestinian history. Kamal Aljafari re-examines these images, here exclusively cinematographic or televisual, and points out the complexity of their status as well as their mode of existence as a political object. A double movement unfolds, that of making these images resurface, sometimes precious testimonies restoring the life, the struggles of the Palestinian people, but also that of rethinking the implicit gaze of those who produced them (the colonial gesture). Kamal Aljafari kneads them, sometimes mistreats them, in order to bring out the underlying ideology, the exoticizing gaze as well as the gestures of dispossession: crossing out the comments of the victors and occupiers (from the British mandate to today), adding, colorizing, removing superimposed texts, modifying sounds, recombining, editing. A gesture of anger and struggle in action as much as a restitution of a distorted or erased memory, A Fidai Film claims to be a form of cinematographic sabotage, a combative film as the title unequivocally indicates. Nicolas Feodoroff

Amsevrid (The Outlandish)

Tahar Kessi

" There are no more places to flee: on all sides, night falls ." Amsevrid opens with the air of a twilight and jazzy thriller, between the parasitic noises of a message left like a bottle thrown into the sea and the crackling of a welding station whose sparks light up one by one men sent back to the anonymity of a small group. Who is SK? Where does this road go? Who is this character? Very quickly, we track down the fiction that disintegrates as we track down reality as television archives and newspaper headlines follow one another around the revolts, conflagrations, betrayals and repressions. They punctuate the history of contemporary Algeria from the depths of the black decade and the terrorist past of the 90s. Tahar Kessi does not seek to explain or embrace a historical truth that would take his side. Outside of any chronology, we walk, picking up here and there the shards of incandescent beauty, shot by shot, assuming to be disoriented in the fold of these trembling images. Amsevrid links spaces, times, men caught in games of echoes and mirrors, shapes, sounds, who seem affected by the same traumas. The characters seem to act as being acted upon in the paranoid climate that the residues of fiction distill. Amsevrid is just as much a dark and poetic journey as a haunted mental map. The territory that Tahar Kessi draws is a continuum of raised bodies, moments of withdrawal, songs, walks. On two occasions, women, gathered around a loom, gather the threads one by one. From the film perhaps. Or from Algeria, which inexorably sees men and women rising up, carried by the idea that revolutions draw their inspiration from the future. Not from the past. Claire Lasolle

Bienvenidos Conquistadores Interplanetarios Y Del Espacio Sideral (Welcome Interplanetary And Sidereal Space Conquerors)

Andrés Jurado

It is about a country, Colombia, held in the background of the history of the conquest of space. A literal background, since NASA set up there in the early 1960s, in the jungle on the border with Panama, the Tropic Survival School, a training camp to teach American astronauts how to survive in the event of a forced landing in a so-called hostile environment. A background, which Andrés Jurado, filmmaker of exhumation (see El Renacer Del Carare , FID 2020), transforms here into a center: that of a counter-history of this conquest, written from the Colombian point of view. The director uses (staged) images of the meeting between astronauts and an Emberá shaman in the jungle as a springboard to launch the material of his film into orbit and propel us into an anachronistic and ghostly space. A constellation of archival images, documents, and sound recordings, testifying to the fascination with the race to the Moon and imperialist extractivism, compose this unusual and delirious journey, which follows a double trajectory. Orbital, and mnemonic. The arrangement of these fragments of reality, on which the director intervenes meticulously – by reframing, animation, reconstitution of synthetic voices – suggests in fact the presence of ghosts and the traces of an unconscious memory. Survivals, recalled by the palpitating echoes of Jacqueline Nova's electroacoustic compositions, and which break into the present of the images. Their connection is an act of revelation. And this spectral journey, a powerful political tool. It reveals the fictions at work in the official narrative, and highlights a decentered narrative, which Andrés Jurado offers us to look at in all its complexity, through the telescope of cinema. Louise Martin Papasian

Bluish

Lilith Kraxner Milena Czernovsky

With Beatrix (FID 2021), their first feature film, Milena Czernovsky and Lilith Kraxner had already demonstrated the subtlety of their art of portraiture, through the attention they paid to the most tenuous gestures, to ways of being, of inhabiting a space, a place. In this second feature film, they focus our attention on two young women, Errol and Sacha, in their twenties. We will know little about them. The film, anchored in their daily lives, leads from situation to situation, just sketched, perceived in fragments, without salient events, seeming to belong to the ordinary of a life apparently without history. "Are you crazy, are you normal, are you weak?" questions in the form of a prologue the magnificent trio of elderly women who punctuate the film like an ancient choir, offering their commentary. From gestures to situations left hanging, through an elliptical montage, bluish lets us glimpse their inner movements as if in dotted lines, showing each of our two protagonists facing their own hesitations, their own enigma. Growing up? Becoming an adult, finding a place to be oneself. And creating one's own self-image. A moment in life, bathed in the blue of the title: that of the city in winter, that of the virtual world that punctuates the film as if echoing their questions. That also of their feelings, of this nuanced atmosphere in which the film is bathed. Nicolas Feodoroff

Círculos Crescentes (Growing Circles)

Pedro Geraldo

Against a black background, a voice in German emerges from the silence, reciting Rainer Maria Rilke's poem I live my life in growing circle. Chimneys smoke above the snow-covered roofs of a small town in northern Germany. Lights on signal life inside the houses. A road separates them from a forest of bare trees surrounding a frozen lake. There, a young woman waits. She wears a long red down jacket down to her feet, and a white fur earmuff. A few shots detail the landscape, and there she is, stripped of her clothes, exchanging a kiss with a stranger, next to a trunk bending over the lake. Pedro Geraldo, discovered via the magnificent Sofia foi (FID 2023), which traced Sofia's mysterious wanderings before her disappearance, paints here a fragmentary portrait of a being uprooted, solitary and isolated. In fixed shots, the downy grains of his DV camera seek as much to fix general views as the expression of this mute character, whose fickle gaze betrays the desire for encounter. His silence contrasts with the echo of the multitude, anonymous conversations mixed with the noises from outside. Melancholy is deposited in touches, and time expands in this painting stripped of any dramatic element, which gives more to feel a state than it delivers a plot; a gentle harshness. Through a subtle play of false connections, Pedro Geraldo blurs the temporality of his film, thus translating the feeling of confusion specific to exile. A feeling familiar to the poet from whom iel draws inspiration: "and I have been filming for centuries; and still do not know: am I a hawk, a storm, or an immense song." Louise Martin Papasian

Clubbing (2024)

Nataliya Ilchuk

Nataliya Ilchuk, a director who also became an actress for the occasion, invites us to a very unusual clubbing experience. A clubbing experience that has been hollowed out. "Who do you want to be?" asks a friend, who is filming her. After some hesitation, "I would like to be myself," she answers on camera. The film will be careful not to draw the precise contours of this "myself." We follow her in this search, as she wanders with her friend and companion, a sort of mute and inverted alter ego, for a few days in the summer of 2019 in Lviv. We do not leave the two thirty-something artists, here after an evening out, there in a karaoke bar, meeting a few characters like this half-friend, half-potential buyer of her paintings, a clue suggesting an unwelcoming off-screen space... Games, discussions, suspended sentences, the film draws moments of complicity as well as of floating between them, letting situations come. From one to the other, in a back-and-forth game, hesitations and laughter play out. In this clubbing, these two women are trying to figure out what to do, who to be. And as the final loop suggests, to film. But film what? The street? Her own? What can still be preserved in this seemingly peaceful city. Preserve the possible while in the background we can guess the war, absent, invisible but at work. For how long? A suspended situation as the finale indicates. Nicolas Feodoroff

Contre Temps / Al Nahar Howa Al Layl (Night Is Day)

Ghassan Salhab

Autumn 2019 in Beirut. The streets are shaking day and night with the slogans and chants of a people who have decided to turn their frustration into revolutionary exhilaration. Ghassan Salhab is in the crowd, at the heart of the uprising. Day after day, demonstration after demonstration, without planning to make a film, he keeps filming. Because he stands with the crowd, rising up as well. Then comes the lockdown, which ruins the momentum. Then the port of Beirut explodes. Then Israel launches its army against Gaza. Autumn 2019-Winter 2023: Night Is Day is both the chronicle of a collective disaster and the diary of a man who only has cinema to protest, in his solitude. Ghassan Salhab decided to make a film out of the dozens of hours of footage collected on his cell phone, using the power of editing to counter the inability of mankind to defy the crushing march of time. As long as the uprising lasts, the shots seem to repeat themselves endlessly, similar yet different, while the succession of songs shows variations on a shared conscience in the making, a prodigious collective force of creation. What the energy of the street actually lifts is time itself, as if suspended in mid-air. When people start wearing masks and the streets become empty, time resumes its course. Night spreads, personal losses make the mourning of the possibility of a shared world even more tragic. The aching beauty of the film lies in its poetic transformation, from collective epic to the individual elegy of a man who continues to film (despite) the collapse, despite the blindness, the helplessness that seem to affect cinema itself. Filming and phrasing: silent words are written on the screen, in place of people's songs. Words exchanged at night with a Palestinian friend, to share what is left: rage and anger. Cyril Neyrat

Défaillance Critique (Critical Failure)

Phoenix Atala

With Critical Failure , Phoenix Atala continues his joyful and welcome enterprise of deconstructing the cinema industry. After the principles and rules of screenwriting revisited in his last work (experimental web series La Formule , 2017), here is the audiovisual industry, its modes of production, its standards, its unspoken things, its hypocrisies and other pseudo-benevolences put through the mill. The subject of the film? Another film, the one that Youssef and Désiré•e are trying to make, a "queer, militant, decolonial, racialized, no-budget film" in Désiré·e's words. One by one, the stages follow one another, from the casting and its sidesteps to the end and its aftermath, as with any blockbuster.
A queer film, then, but also speculative: set in a future anchored in our present, conducted in a comedy tone, taking place in a universe mixing musical comedy and militant dystopian-utopian science fiction, with Atala himself as director. In the sights of the filmmaker and the characters, as it is sung, "cinema, the film industry, propaganda of the heterosexual order". The aim of this double-edged blow? To invent a form in line with one's personal experience. Critical Failure is a corrosive aesthetic-political satire, embellished with a good dose of self-mockery and which does not preach. Like the duo of artists involved in the making of their film, Phoenix Atala questions the systems of domination and the paths to its emancipation. A meta-film as theoretical as it is practical, as a method for making cinema differently.
Nicolas Feodoroff

Do You Want To See Part Two?

cricri sora ren

Let's start with a hypothesis: what would the world generated by Artificial Intelligence look like? Second hypothesis: aren't we already there? How can we find our way around? Starting from there, Cricri sora ren, or the duo formed by Christian von Borries ( The Dubai in me , FID 2010) and AI, questions our world, the political fantasies that run through it, by mainly articulating three places with concrete geography: so-called communist China, Berlin and, as a center of gravity, Putin's post-2022 wartime Russia. Here we are caught up in a dystopian historical-hysterical speculation (our world?), in a maelstrom of images, social networks and video games at work. A very real world where AI and propaganda go hand in hand. A slippery world where, through the virtues of computer-generated images, von Borries in his own way squeezes the same two moments as Putin, who compresses 1945-2022 into a dizzying temporal short-circuit. But let's not be mistaken: the two worlds, virtual and real, are more than interconnected. In this whirlwind, using voices, texts and images generated by AI, the director himself finds himself digested. However, as a good moralist, he overplays and points out the confusions, the involutions, the contaminations from one world to another. The operation produces a "film on the homogenization of behaviors", which he invites us to receive in the light of Walter Benjamin's famous phrase according to which "there is no document of culture that is not also a document of barbarism". But would it also be a world, rejoices Cricri sora ren, where the notion of authorship has disappeared? And where AI could ultimately produce results where utopias have failed? We have been warned. Nicolas Feodoroff

È A Questo Punto Che Nasce Il Bisogno Di Fare Storia (It Is At This Point That The Need To Write History Arises)

Constanze Ruhm

WARNING: Be forewarned that some people face the possibility of experiencing photosensitive epileptic seizures. As the 1980s dawned, Carla Lonzi, an art historian and key figure in the feminist revolts of 1970s Italy, devoted the final years of her life to researching a group of 17th century French proto-feminists known as 'Les Précieuses' – made famous by a play by Molière – which gave rise to Armande, sono io!, published posthumously in 1992. Based on this unfinished project with Lonzi's notes, thoughts and sketches, Constanze Ruhm offers a militant reflection that echoes her previous film Gli appunti di Anna Azzori/Uno specchio che viaggia nel tempo (FID 2020), devoted to the reluctant heroine from the famous movie Anna (1975), which she sets about deconstructing. With this investigation, the film invents a movement in which these 17th century figures converse with voices from the 1970s to the present day. Included are publications by Rivolta Femminile, founded by Lonzi (and some of their authors, first and foremost Suzanne Santoro), as well as essays that intersect, interweave and respond to each other. Ruhm is accompanied on this adventure by the young protagonists who traverse the film, giving body and voice to past and current struggles and their demands, from one era to another. Here we find them taking part in an audition or reincarnating their elders, there returning to haunt a former women's prison in Rome, or reappropriating poses borrowed from the paintings of Artemisia Gentileschi. All these gestures pay homage to the figures of the past, issuing a call to take up what has been started, deflected and fragmented, and to implement it by activating its transformative powers. Nicolas Feodoroff

El Espiritu De La Araña (The Spirit Of The Spider)

Antonia Rossi

Who, as a child, has never played the solitary demiurge, arranging figurines and characters in a makeshift theatre? Who is this person manipulating the shadows in a disused factory where there's barely any daylight? With El espíritu de la araña, making worlds and making a film find an identity of their own in a flexible adventure flowing organically between the qualities of the shots, the blurring and sharpness, shadows and reflections, image-making techniques and iconographic collections. And all this in a radical silence that brings the living creature closer to the animal world. Antonia Rossi's camera accompanies rather than observes these actions of creation, everyday rituals in the hushed atmosphere of this abandoned and ostensibly hostile place. Its inhabitant makes a kind of lichen grow, and covers herself with it – a literal way of taking root. Sprouted seeds become a landscape in which a hand, filmed in close-up, slides like a futuristic slug. El espíritu de la araña is the unfolding of a mutation via the experimental fabrication of a different way of living. Living like a spider. The outside is spied on and kept at a distance. This dichotomy constructed with an interior is less a separation of space than of time. Urban visions could be the ruins of a before, and this interior, another form of ruin (here industrial), a future as an opportunity to reconfigure images and symbols, and produce new narratives… and therefore new worlds. The cinematic space is, then, the ideal place for the Chthulucene (a name whose first source is a small Californian spider) to occur, a parallel space-time invented by Donna Haraway, where "the possibilities of living in the ruins of capitalism" are gingerly created, precious, secret possibilities that are constantly threatened by the destructive appetite of cranes. Claire Lasolle

Festa Major (Major Party)

Jean-Baptiste Alazard

In Fillols, as in many villages in the French countryside, for a few days in summer each year, the rural exodus seems not to have taken place. Everyone returns for the annual festival, to take a few days and nights away from the ordinary life together. So-called documentary cinema has filmed this type of festival a lot. But where most films are content to document, that is to say, to run in vain after the festival and its energy, Festa Major makes it the subject of a glorification of life. Of life as it passes on faces, in looks, gestures, outbursts of voice, as it constitutes the beauty of each and the community of all. "I film the life that we try to live by crossing it as we walk in a dream". This program, stated at the opening, is that of Jean-Baptiste Alazard since La Buissonnière (FID 2013). The secret of its success has not changed: the brilliance of natural light, the sharpness of the frames, the liveliness of the editing, the music of the colours. In other words, a poetics of 16 mm as a transfiguration of reality. What changes here is the scale of the poetic operation, its anthropological and political scope. "Life unfolds and winds": everything in Festa Major works towards this conversion of the line into a circle. The celebration is this conversion: the gyratory movement of the dance, the circularity of the seasons, the maintenance and conservation of forms, of gestures, in the passage of the years. Festa Major , a film-celebration, praises the cycle, the return: an ancient topos to which the worsening storm of progress, the acceleration of the speed of destruction of forms of life and the accumulation of ruins gives an ever more political, paradoxically revolutionary meaning. Between medieval Occitan gesture (troubadour prosody, lights and colors of stained glass) and lovingly parodic reprise of Debord (his melancholic praise of friendship), Festa Major celebrates the marriage of cinema and life. In full glory. Cyril Neyrat

Flamenco (2024)

Jean-Claude Rousseau

Nothing seems more contrary to the contemplative slowness of Jean-Claude Rousseau's cinema than the wild rhythm of flamenco. A stay in Cadiz nevertheless inspired the author of Welcome (FID 2022) to create a form capable not only of welcoming the tremors of Andalusian dance, but also of responding to them with his own fiery choreography. We are, as in many of Rousseau's films, in a hotel room. We do not leave it, nor the unique frame that divides the space into three vertical bands. On the left, the entrance to the room through which its occupant enters and exits, looking hesitant, troubled. On the right, a frosted glass wall behind which a naked body writhes and moans – pleasure, suffering? In the center, the central panel, a white surface of appearance and disappearance, of the man's body but also of the image of a headless woman dancing flamenco. From this device, the filmmaker has taken his art of editing to a new level of freedom and fantasy thanks to the fantastic powers of superimposition. Two speeds of the same passion oppose and meet: the frenzy of a dancing body, the slow-motion consumption of the other in his glass cage. A body turned into flame, gestures of a tortured person, a drowned person, or an ecstatic lover. It is the very soul of flamenco that the film unfolds by editing the images in the shot: an exit from oneself, through which pain and pleasure are indistinguishable – provided that one burns. One can imagine that the man who enters and leaves the room has visited the museums and churches of Seville and Cadiz. That he admired the paintings of Greco and Zurbaran there, before imitating them in his glass cage. And to add, to the masterpieces of the past, a new triptych of the Passion. Cyril Neyrat

Frieda Tv

Lea Lanoë

Gerda Frieda Janett Gröger, "born in 1972, astrological sign Libra, egg-swatter", is on the breach. She traces furrows in reality with poetic and punk punchlines and leaves nothing alone (public space, psychiatric denominations, us). Léa Lanoé's first feature film is a luminous and poignant documentary portrait. That said, the filmic object thus categorized, everything remains to be said. Frieda TV remains irreducible to a genre as Gerda Frieda Janett Gröger escapes any attempt to be grasped, fixed, defined. It rather secretes the idea that it is her character herself who puts herself on stage according to her good will, while constantly reminding, by the discreet and tender presence of the director, that the filmed relationship comes from a primordial complicity. It is striking then how much the gentleness of Léa Lanoé responds to the dazzling vitality of Gerda Frieda Janett Gröger. And vice versa. Frieda TV is the testimony of a friendship that made cinema the object of an act of mutual recognition: one agreeing to play the game, the other to make a film. The scenes and moments of life that the filmmaker and her model shared over a long and indefinite period of time are recorded, in 16 mm or DV, and edited at skin level. The whole thing respects and firmly embraces the identity changes as well as the variations in intensity that make and unmake Frieda's daily life. Because she makes the camera her ally, we can bear the frontality of her words that expose the violence of which she was a victim, the intimate disasters as well as the states she goes through. And the film thus produces its double movement: building a path to meet her and translating, through its fragmentary editing, her states of being. Frieda TV is there, at a radiant intersection that questions with rare finesse our normopathic ways, individual and collective, of welcoming those we say are crazy. Claire Lasolle

Autumn Clothes

Yohei Yamakado

Autumn Clothes could be like the day of O Marinheiro (FID 2023), which offered the work of Fernando Pessoa to the ear. Same workshop, same dam. Another journey. The black screen of Yohei Yamakado's previous film is replaced by the light of a spring in Porto, the outpouring of Debussy's Suite bergamasque , the sweetness of an arrival at the station, a lipstick, ebony hair, a very blue jacket, three kind faces, a visit. In O Marinheiro , Rita Senra lent her voice to the reading of the text. Here, she is inaudible since the film is silent: Yohei Yamakado plays with the springs of silent cinema. A book is found by Mana Haraguchi, the visiting friend: Autumn Clothes by Ichiyo Iguchi. The Japanese language then emerges, the filmmaker's native language. An internal language, it seems to come from elsewhere. Indeed, the filmmaker organizes a double distance from a playback: the reading is asynchronous (recorded in a time other than that of the shooting), and the sound of the voice slightly desynchronized in relation to the movement of the lips. From this last discrepancy, disturbing, a gap emerges. That of exile perhaps. Rita Senra prepares tea for her friend, in small cups that we say are Japanese. The shots composed like paintings by Giorgo Morandi or Paul Cézanne are combined with elegant superimpositions taken from the reader's reverie. Each note, color, texture, exalts our sensitivity. In its refinement and its porcelain delicacy, Habits d'automne is based on an existential requirement: "Beauty will save the world" said Dostoyevsky. " Cinema, for Yohei Yamakado, is then a country where works and cultures respond to each other and where all the arts are celebrated. The workshop, a "place without a home" dear to Jean-Luc Nancy, a place where "something common and therefore meaningful" occurs, of "being-with" is the place "of a being touched by existing". Thank you for the visit. Claire Lasolle

Harmony

Bertrand Dezoteux

"Harmony" recounts man's first steps on the eponymous exoplanet. It takes its name from its landscapes with rainbow geologies, but also from a genetic strangeness that allows its inhabitants, with enchanting voices, to reproduce among themselves without distinction of species.

If I Fall, Don’t Pick Me Up

Declan Clarke

Berlin, 1974. Walter Asmus, a young 32-year-old director, assists Samuel Beckett, 68, for his first personal production of Waiting for Godot . Very quickly, the professional understanding becomes a friendship that will last until the writer's death. It can be said of this film, without being mistaken, that it tells the story of this friendship. He does it in the manner of Declan Clarke, according to his routine: in fixed shots, in 16mm, in the present tense, by articulating visual and sound description of the places, presentation of archives, and objective narration of the facts. The archives are those of Asmus: postcards received from Beckett, annotated scripts of the plays they staged together, etc. The places are those of Beckett's routines during his stays in Berlin or Stuttgart: studios, restaurants, parks. Sobriety, factuality. But because Declan Clarke is one of those filmmakers who know how to create feelings while sticking to the facts, If I fall don't pick me up converts the chronicle into a poignant eulogy, not of a man, but of a relationship and the values ​​that found it: loyalty and fidelity, sobriety and rigor. And because these values ​​have always informed the artist's life and practice, a strange mutation occurs before our eyes - a revelation: the world seen by those of Declan Clarke is Beckettian. This world of modernity, or what remains of it, these empty, deserted places, these minimal architectures, form a frozen setting waiting for a play by Beckett. Directed by Asmus. And if the film begins in the Wicklow mountains and ends on the stage of the Gate Theater, in Dublin, it is because the exercise of admiration is also, despite its author, a very indirect self-portrait. All modesty and restraint. " Hold back! " » Declan Clarke, like Walter Asmus, has learned the lesson of the great Sam. Cyril Neyrat

Kunst Der Farbe

Mariano Llinás

Kunst der Farbe is the third part to a triptych on Mondongo, an Argentinian duo of artists, and long-time friends of the filmmaker. The initiative of making their portrait, as shown in Mondongo 2, was a painful failure. Then why make a third film? Simply because failure, the impossible, are what drive Mariano Llinás' work. In the present case, the project was a challenge thrown to Mondongo by Llinás: since you have already created a baptistery based on Johannes Itten's The Art of Color (see Mondongo 1), let's make a film where you and me will make a piece of art out of this seminal theoretical work. Cinema challenges painting to a duel. But the duel never occurs and Llinás ends up making his film alone, or with a few accomplices who are delighted to play along. For when a film project fails, then you can start having fun with the remainders. Putting on a show. And Kunst der Farbe is a comedy of color. Needless to say, the remainders are anything but garbage: there are shots gleaned by Agustín Mendilaharzu in the countryside and on the road in Argentina, following planes, motorcycles, cars, in search of all the colors of the world ; but also fragments from Feuillade films, whose black-and-white lends itself to all types of hues ; screentests and rehearsals of hilarious skits with Llinás as a histrionic fool wearing an eyeglass in the style of Fritz Lang; paintings that are emblematic of a history of color (Giorgione for green, Carpaccio for red, El Greco for gray, etc.); a brilliant course on color in cinema, given by the color grader on her work station, directly on Agustin's shots. Triumph of cinema, surrender of painting. But above all else, there is an extraordinary musical score, written for the film after Itten's book – one movement per color, all performed in the concert hall. Everything is being manufactured, devised in front of our captivated eyes, to the hectic, explosive rhythm of the music-driven editing. If cinema, as Godard said, is "the fraternity of metaphors," then Kunst der Farbe is the very prototype of an as yet unknown means of transport. Cyril Neyrat

La Chambre d’ombres (The Room Of Shadows)

Camilo Restrepo

Ten years ago, in Impression of a War, Camilo Restrepo explored how the war that has been tearing his native Colombia apart for decades has left traces that constitute a visual memory. With Room of Shadows, he invents an allegorical device that broadens and universalizes this reflection, drawing on examples from the entire history of representations of war and violence. At the center of the allegory stands a woman, alone in her home during wartime. She has no name, no identity of her own, like the war, from which we only hear the racket outside. Who is this woman? As she says at the beginning of the film, she is the first person to not only draw a portrait, but most importantly to memorize an image: the shadow cast on a wall by her lover before he went off to war – Pliny the Elder reread by Restrepo. Let's imagine that this woman has since memorized all representations of war. That, in her besieged room, certain images come back to her like shadows. When she isn't focusing on the war threatening to destroy her home, she begins to describe and interpret these images: a painting by Paul Klee, a film by Travis Wilkerson, a photo by Susan Meiselas, etc. Her words project the representations into the viewer's brain, which in turn becomes a room of shadows and a theatre of thought. At the heart of the film, the description of Brecht's Kriegsfibel, a.k.a. War Primer, confirms the Brechtian nature of the project: far more than an imaginary museum, Room of Shadows is a prototype of an educational machine, a war machine against the illusions that distort our relationship to representations, against all forms of manipulation of the relationship between image and reality. A camera lucida meant to enlighten us. Cyril Neyrat

La Nuit D’à Côté (The Night Next Door)

Muriel Montini

"A forest where animals seem to live in harmony. In the distance, a dialogue between a man and a woman. In the distance, a war is raging." This is how Muriel Montini summarizes her latest film. Not far, nearby, the animals. We only see them, or almost: bears, hinds, stags, boars, nocturnal visions of a patch of forest in Romania, captured by the director on a bear watching site. Almost, because the film opens with a painting by Poussin – Spring or The Earthly Paradise – and ends with an aquatint by Goya – The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters . At the beginning of the film, the night shots in Romania call to mind the earthly paradises of Baroque painting, in which all the animals of Creation coexisted in a single landscape. In this camera-lit night, we marvel at the sight of bears and deer in the same shot. But the monster is right there, nearby: it is Putin, with his toneless, empty voice of a petty crime official. We can hear his wars in the distance. Heaven, hell. At an equal distance from the two, Muriel Montini has composed her own version of Purgatory: the conversation on the phone of a couple grappling with the ordinary snags of relationships: jealousy, narcissism, frustration. Right in the middle of the film, Jean-Luc Godard appears, via the beautiful eulogy written at the time of his death by his friend Jean Narboni. Why Godard? Because, as the critic says, love and war were his only subjects. The tribute is poignant, but it is more, much more than a tribute: a continuation. As JLG used to do, the director of Je suis une heroine périphérique (FID 2021) produces cinema, poetry and thought out of whatever comes to hand: scraps from a previous film, salvaged images and sounds, beloved texts and paintings. The rumble of war stirs the animals, the pains of love tint their world with the colors of human affect. But in another night, nearby, something Edenic keeps on dawning. Cyril Neyrat

Land Ohne Worte (Land Without Worth)

Antoinette Zwirchmayr

"And when people ask me: 'How was it, then?', I say 'Nothing'". The woman who utters this sentence, motionless in front of the camera, starts climbing the steps of a staircase, soon joined by another woman, then a third. Eventually, six women and one man, all dressed in the same white tunic, climb up and down the stairs that lead nowhere: bare, geometric elements of the set, spread throughout the huge, equally bare and geometric interior space of a modern industrial architecture. At times, the bodies come to a halt, in turns, then start going up or down the stairs again with the same solemn, rhythmic pace. Land ohne Worte is the cinematic translation of a text by German playwright Dea Loher: a woman painter meditates on her art, on art and its history, and more specifically on the possibilities and impossibilities for art to represent the reality of a violent, war-torn world. Originally a first-person monologue, here the text is shared out among seven performers, who take turns reciting it. This principle of fragmentation and multiplication affects all the elements of the film: the character is divided into seven bodies, faces and voices; the set elements; directing and cutting, subject to an infinite variation of viewpoints and shot scales. Which art? Why art? What to paint? Redoing Hockney with crippled bodies? Knives appear in hands or stuck into stairs: to skin the bodies, to self-harm, to tear up canvases? Words endlessly unfolding the same concern, a land without words: what this dense, austere, impressive film questions is the very possibility of describing, naming, representing the reality of a world where "every recognizable thing disappears." Antoinette Zwirchmayr has created nothing less than a contemporary version of Piranesi' Imaginary prisons. Prisons described by Marguerite Yourcenar as "a world that is fake and yet eerily real, claustrophobic and yet megalomaniac, reminiscent of the one to which modern humanity confines itself more and more each day…" Here we are. Cyril Neyrat

Lázaro De Noche (Lazaro At Night)

Nicolás Pereda

Lázaro, Luisa and Francisco, in their forties, live in Mexico City. Friends, they also form a loving trio. Nothing gives it away, as their exchanges are emptied of any affection. Prosaic, contradictory, repetitive, they diffuse a slight unease as much as they produce a comic effect. The first movement of Lázaro de noche shows their ordinary daily life punctuated by comical casting scenes, for a film about which we will know nothing, except the method of its director to audition them: observation. With Lázaro de noche , Nicolás Pereda continues his enterprise initiated more than fifteen years ago with his faithful community of actor friends. He brings them together in a mutant film with an unparalleled tone, in which he articulates images of the banal and the marvelous, and thereby explores the limits of realism, inspired by the words of the Argentinian writer César Aira. During a dinner that brings together the three protagonists, a change of camera angle and the emergence of a voice from the past plunge the film into another space-time, that of memory. Barely have they met in a writing workshop and the beginnings of their ballet of love been sketched out, when the evocation of the tale of Aladdin written at the time by Luisa projects the story into a third level of fiction and representation. Lázaro and his mother Teresita now embody Aladdin and his mother, in a profane variation of the tale, a fairy tale of raw triviality. If, over the course of its transformations, Lázaro de noche moves away from reality – from reality to memory, from memory to tale – it is without sacrificing any of its tangible materiality; the film seems to become disenchanted as it re-enchants itself. And if reading Aladdin is surprising - because, by making the same wish for food repeatedly, the hero "refuses to make the causal leap of magic and chooses the step by step of reality" (César Aira) -, Nicolás Pereda, himself, invites us to find the magic in this same step by step.

Le Colloque Des Chiens (The Colloquy of Dogs)

Norman Nedellec

If there is an animal whose legendary proximity makes us curious about the human community, it would undoubtedly be the dog. Norman Nedellec wins the bet of bringing back into fashion a less famous text by Miguel de Cervantes, The Colloquium of the Dogs , in which Berganza and Scipio, two canines, discuss an entire night in front of a hospital. This animal fable paints a vitriolic portrait of the human race capable of the greatest baseness. The filmmaker offers a brilliant adaptation in a brief but ample gesture that takes literally the idea of ​​these beasts gifted with speech. In a colorful staging, he uses the tricks and tips of cinema to make two big dogs, Ivar and Drogon, talk while locked in a car. The Koulechov effect works wonderfully. At the center, a few well-chosen pieces of the original text to which is grafted a network of heterogeneous visual escapes that take us from meadows burned by a summer sun to the tombstones of the cemetery of the Dogs of Asnières-sur-Seine, from the blue of a sky to that of the flashing lights of an ambulance. Attention and precision dominate the film: the way in which the harpsichord converses with the noise of the cars, the rhythm and delicacy of the diction of the narrators who lend their voices, the place and intensity of each shot, the sensitivity with which the animal is filmed. From the apologue, Norman Nedellec keeps the timeless philosophical depth. From the cinema, he draws a playful fabric conducive to the very fair commentary of our contemporary realities. Thus, Le colloquium des chiens , mixed with humor and poetry, navigates between a playful joy and a beautiful gravity. That of these faithful companions who humbly hold up to us the mirror of our condition.

Object Lesson

Herman Asselberghs

The "object lesson", a traditional teaching method that has been somewhat forgotten, consists of presenting an everyday object by naming its characteristics and properties. For this lesson, the object in question and the place are not indifferent. Herman Asselberghs, whose attachment to uncovering from film to film the ideological springs at work in technological objects is well known, chooses a camera, more precisely a Black Magic. The lesson is conducted in a school by film students. Two forms of devices, therefore, and of course the object is the very tool of the film unfolding before our eyes. From this starting point, Asselberghs leads step by step to the heart of the act of seeing, of filming. Playing with sound with malice, he thwarts the false evidence of the visible and its pitfalls. Paradoxes and twists of meaning are highlighted by the decision to film the students of the school in fixed shots, while each one is absorbed in a task: listening, watching, reading, in an architecture with displayed transparency, supported by a surveillance camera. The camera and the place of learning: two machines for manufacturing the modalities of the gaze that we have on reality? Two vision machines? At the very least, the film invites us to a movement of thought between opacity and visibility, from the dark room dedicated to appearances to this ideologically transparent box that is architecture here. A dizzying object lesson, where a reflection on the manufacture and processing of images, the control they produce, and absorption as a vanishing point are played out.

Leisure, Utopic

Beatrice Gibson

Interior, dim light: a young boy sits at a desk, his mother at his side; he reads a text printed on a sheet of paper placed in front of him. Exterior, sunlight: the end of a meal in the garden, hands clearing away plates, another child hiding his joy behind a strange mask of white fur, which gives him the appearance of a creature from another world. This short film is the first in a series of adaptations by Beatrice Gibson of Utopia , a book published in 1984 by the New York poet Bernadette Mayer. Chapter 4: "The Arrangement: of houses and buildings, of birth, of death, of money, of schools, of dentists, of birth control, of work, of air, of medicines, etc." » From this utopian program in the form of an inventory, the boy reads the development by Bernadette Mayer in an updated version to include other reasons for arrangement: "There is no Instagram, Twitter is what birds do...". The boy reads, sometimes he stumbles over the words, his mother helps him, guides him. The desynchronization of sound and image frees the voices and faces, magnifies their presence: listening, attention, play, joy. The sensuality of 16mm acts like a luminous caress, an embrace. Leisure, utopia: the articulation of the two words states a double credo. 1: utopia, in any case as thought and written by a non-binary female poet like Bernadette Mayer, is a matter of everyday life, a form of life, here and now, one thing after another. 2: utopia is, or should be, child's play. Rarely has the revolt against the world order been expressed with such a mixture of power and simplicity. It lasts two minutes, it seems very small, a home movie , but it is vast, intense and beautiful as the world could be.

Wolves (2024)

Isabelle Prim

Mid-18th century at the court of Louis XV: "he eats!", "he shits!" While the automaton exploits of Vaucanson's duck strike the three knocks of an era of Enlightenment and reason, the exhibition of the remains of the Beast of Gévaudan tolls the death knell for the centuries of darkness: "he was only a big wolf!" Yet women and children continue to die devoured in the forests around the castle of Saint-Alban. Two centuries later, in Saint-Alban as everywhere, the illusion of such a division between darkness and light has fizzled out. The Spanish anarchist psychiatrist François Tosquelles opens the walls of the asylum, lets the madmen out and the world in: the invention of institutional psychotherapy. Slipping into the breach of this spatial coincidence, Isabelle Prim invents a marvelous machine for confusing centuries and inner worlds. As every year in Saint-Alban, the asylum becomes a theater: madmen and not so madmen prepare a show about the Beast of Gévaudan. Agnès designs the poster, Thérèse stays in bed, haunted by her brother Bruno. The woods around the castle, where this disturbing character lives, a hermit-artist, a holy magician loved by children, are the interworld where all boundaries are abolished: a kingdom of play, fantasy, and belief. Among the many successful bets of this risky film on a wire, there is that of having actors play madness. What Prim accomplishes with her formidable troupe is astounding: embodying not madness but madness , singular and collective, in a way that is not only credible, but true. Les Loups is theater multiplied by the genius of the filmmaker's own editing: all the powers of the false to create a truth beyond the division between madness and reason. During this film, whose humor never strays from emotion, it is the very experience of Tosquelles' Saint-Alban that is rediscovered, re-shared: this very saving invention of a human environment where unreason can be deployed as an individual and anti-society genius. In this asylum, in this film, in the forests of Gévaudan, there is not " one big wolf." There are plenty of wolves, big and small, elusive bodies and unfathomable souls. Away from the performance, a man leaning against a wall reads this question in his notebook, in a low voice: "Can it be that the madman uses his reason to make an asylum of his madness?" The polymath of Wolves answers with a resounding "Yes!"

Life Story

Jessica Dunn Rovinelli

We remember Empathy ( FID 2016) and So Pretty (FID 2019) where Jessica Dunn Rovinelli focused in an art of broad, fair, delicate portraiture, to depict other lives contrary to clichés. With Life Story she draws a portrait not of but with the philosopher McKenzie Wark, author of the Hacker Manifesto . This film, where cinematic, human and political intimacy come together, unfolds in a form as short as it is dense to praise all the splendor of a trans body shown in majesty. The means are as simple as they are singular. While we listen to McKenzie read a text written for the occasion, in the form of an address, sharing her thoughts on her life, the political struggles waged, their theoretical issues, Jessica films her in the intimacy of her domestic space, attentive to this body from which this speech carries, assumed as a work of life in its own right. Everything is offered in its nudity in what is most private, therefore most political: a body that is one's own and that one has shaped, a surface and a history, the fruit of what one receives as of one's own will. The challenge is to offer an exercise of the gaze: de-framing, displaced points of view, centrality questioned. A way of putting back into motion what would make the heart of the image in its very principle. The encounter, which is also a political meditation, is punctuated by unpredictable surges of colors (the film, after Marriage Story , is now part of a colorful series). The pure chromatic qualities, which are offered as visual pleasure, parasitize and magnify, transcend the film. Life story , singular and generous, thus suggests the possibility of a gaze as if refurbished, a possible echo of the transition that is depicted there. But perhaps, above all, the possibility of a film as a gesture of love.

The Lost Capitules (Lost Chapters)

Lorena Alvarado

Visiting the family home in Caracas for the summer, Ena takes up her place again with her grandmother, Mamama, and her father. He literally lives in books and continues the crazy enterprise of saving, without anyone knowing exactly from what or why, the Venezuelan literary heritage. Following the discovery of a postcard hidden in a book, Ena sets off in search of the mysterious work of a writer, Rafael Coronado, who is said to have written under many pseudonyms. Los capitulos perdudos does not explore these promising intrigues. On the contrary, Lorena Alvarado sketches them out as so many false leads and prefers to leave the narrative dimension hanging. In an economy of retention, Los capitulos perdudos installs atmospheres, stases that result in a gentle melancholy. The character of the grandmother irremediably loses her memory. The young woman seeks to remember; her father runs after the rare works that he still has to find in the mass of dead leaves that books for Venezuela seem to have become – some great readers are dead, others have gone to the other side of the Atlantic. We learn little about the socio-political situation. She is an off-screen person who penetrates the family bubble through echoes, allusions, ricochets. The filmmaker deposits a touch of sadness on the imposing libraries, in the large hollowed-out rooms of the house, the desolate urban spaces. A diffuse feeling of abandonment then hangs over everyday life. From what story, intimate or collective, do the lost chapters of the film's title come? There remains what can be preserved from being swallowed up in the torpor of summer, which we feel threatens the characters to their very core: the tenderness between the members of this family, a motorcycle ride which offers to our lucky eyes the vital energy of the frescoes of Caracas, the modest sharing of a love for literature, a poem saved from oblivion.

Mitología De Barrio (A Suburban Mythology)

Antonio Llamas Jorge Rojas Alejandro Pérez Castellanos

In the torpor of a summer afternoon with suspended temporality, crushed by sunlight, falsely deserted spaces are revealed. Large fixed shots that come to life with insistent figures but seem lost in the places: here dogs on a walk, there a man planted as much in as in front of the landscape, or another crossing the frame at a running pace. From one close-up to the next, these sketches with a burlesque tone seem to haunt the city as much as to inhabit the dreams of the character who lives at the heart of the film: Mr. Tang, in his small neighborhood shop. Without any indication of location, over the course of this survey a form of generic and singular mental map of this periphery gradually takes shape. With its own mythology, as drawn by the three young members of the collective " espíritu escalera ". A city subject to creeping gentrification also appears, suggested by touches. Far from the center, from power, and without it, as the final montage underlines not without irony.

Our O World (Gold Songs)

Ico Costa

On-board camera, as if pulled along by her characters, Ico Costa creates a melodramatic fiction in close collaboration with the locals, capturing their realities as closely as possible while working on typical situations. "The simpler the stories, the truer they are", said Fassbinder. Domingo and Neusia play themselves. They are young and in love. He works in a car wash but his boss does not pay him. She is pregnant. He decides to go to the other side of Mozambique to work in the gold mines to support his future family. Ico Costa embarks on a sensual and patient rewriting of reality, dissecting the heart of an exploitative system based on gold panning and the resulting way of life. Very concrete, O ouro e o mundo exposes a social status: the heavy bags of dirt carried under a blazing sun, the barefoot walks on muddy paths, the labour and the waiting, the men on one side gathered around the same plate, the women on the other, their eyes turned towards the future, with the pending hope of the return of those who are far away. While the general economy of the film plays with the visual mechanics of the documentary, oscillating between crudity and coyness to blur the lines – the use of fiction makes it possible to set up head-on scenes that dig deeper into the violence and brutality with which the characters are confronted: such is the case with the tragic death of a comrade crushed in the mines. But the dense and precious raw material of the film remains the improvised or rewritten conversations. They unravel the dreams, motivations and disillusions of these men and women who clearly see the circulation of their desires subject to the gold that has become more precious to others than their lives.

Pan To Mime

Michel S Zumpf

Pantomime: A show in which the artist expresses himself solely through gestures, facial expressions, and attitudes. Of course, Pierrot, the patron saint of mimes, is the main character in Michel Zumpf's new film. But if he takes care to break down the word to form his title, it is to broaden its scope. PAN TO MIME. It's up to us to play. We can pronounce it in English, because the film goes back and forth on both sides of the Channel, between the rooftops of Paris and the banks of the Thames, between the music of the two languages ​​and with beloved writers: Verlaine and Laforgue, Chesterton, and Dickinson. But it is to ancient Greek that we must return, to the etymology: imitation of everything. This has been the filmmaker's project since Le Géographe Manuel (1996), a project that he takes here to an unprecedented level of sophistication, grace, and musicality: to make poetry out of everything. At the origin of Michel Zumpf's cinema, there is an extraordinary curiosity, a mad appetite to find the beautiful, the remarkable, everywhere, in everything. Curiosity redoubled by a collector's passion. PAN TO MIME is the reordered disorder, by the genius of editing, of a series of collections: of places, books, words, objects, musical instruments, languages ​​(English and French but also Russian, Italian, Japanese, etc.) Collection also, and it is the flesh of the film, of a whole people of living beings: animals, men and women of all ages, renowned actors or musicians, donkey or pig breeders, whose bodies and faces, lovingly filmed, impress the 35mm film with their singular vitality. Words and things of the past, ruins of the Pathé factories or the manor of Saint Pol Roux; landscapes and faces of today. Everything is in tune with the same time, that of the film, its music, and its rhythm, which abolishes the others. If silent cinema has resurrected the forgotten art of pantomime, Zumpf's sound art exhumes and fulfills another promise of the 19th century - that of Baudelaire, of poetic modernity as correspondences and elevation: to grant eternity to everything that passes, to tear the century itself from the century.

Parque De Diversões (Amusement Park)

Ricardo Alves Jr.

Nighttime glow of the city. Individuals hug the walls, casting furtive glances here and there before discreetly crossing the gates of a park. Forceful entry, guitar riffs. In this amusement park, an urban hererotopia where only playful pleasures reign, Ricardo Alves Jr stages a night of gay cruising, terribly sensual, entirely punctuated by games of glances and carnal exchanges. The camera slides, flows between the trees and the attractions bathed in pink and blue, to follow the movement of the anonymous silhouettes. Few words, but fluids exchanged as the encounters follow one another during the film but which we imagine to be simultaneous. Observe, slide a hand, a tongue, kiss, and go see elsewhere. In this hot and humid night where sight is precious, a blind man is offered the complicit story of the scenes taking place around him, before being in turn subjected to the caresses of a man. No need to see to participate in this great orgy, where only flesh and desire count. Raw sex and pleasure are shown without shame by the director who plays with fantasies and fetishes with amusement. The thrusts do not prevent bursts of laughter, on the contrary, they provoke them. And here is sex reduced to its pure power of play and invention. Because as it is said at the beginning of the film, "Breaking the toy is playing even more. The pieces become other games: we will build another secret. The fragments become other realities."

Pepe

Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias

A voice that claims to belong to a hippopotamus. A voice that does not understand the perception of time. A voice that tells of a historical event as if in a trance. "Am I making that sound that comes out of my mouth? And what is a mouth anyway?" The only thing the animal knows for sure is that it is dead. The first and only hippopotamus ever killed in the Americas. The Colombian press called him Pepe. Between encounters and misunderstandings, epiphanies and sadness, we enter a world full of stories replete with even more stories. In a serious and playful way, both authentic and deceptive, images and sounds narrate the overwhelming orality of places full of beings who, like Pepe, died without ever knowing where they really were.

Rizal’s Makamisa: Pantasma Ng Higanti (Makamisa: Phantasm Of Revenge)

Khavn

With Rizal's MAKAMISA: Pantasma ng Higanti, Khavn De La Cruz delivers a monster of a film, both epic and highly personal, radical as is his wont, part pamphlet, part historical saga, part intimate novel, part parable. The setting? The Philippines in the late 19th century, between two forms of colonialism, Spanish and American. The starting point is a text, Makamisa, the outline of a novel left unfinished in the 1890s by the poet and revolutionary José Rizal – a veritable national treasure – in which he denounced religious abuse and oppression. Passed through Khavn's caustic and furiously political filter, the result is a film that looks like a fresco from the early days of cinema, a little like Griffith's – without the extras, but with the excess. The figures could have stepped straight out of a genre film, somewhere between a zombie movie and a Western set in a fantasy universe. The fable follows the agonies and torments of a malevolent priest (Khavn himself) and Rizal the poet as they vie for the favours of a poor woman, Crazy Sisa. An intense nightmare, for which Khavn has meticulously reworked each image by hand (colours and scratches), giving the movie the shaky effect of an old film reel that was forgotten, or that fell into the hands of a scratch fanatic. A not-so-distant past is thrown into sharp relief, with obvious echoes in today's Philippines – and far beyond. An otherworldly soundtrack by David Toop, Khavn and the Kontra-Kino Orchestra lends a gloomy tone to this firebreak against today's political crises.

Shuruuk

Amie Barouh

A pile of blankets filmed at bed height appears in a room with faded colors. Fragmented views follow one another, suggesting the fragile living conditions of people living in the rubble of a suburb. A prayer in Romanian signals their origin. A plane passes in the sky and we are transported to a parade of shimmering colors in the streets of Okinawa, before landing at a beekeeper's in Ariège. The Franco-Japanese artist Amie Barouh brings together in a form of filmed diary fragments of biography and snippets of conversations collected over the years and during her travels, mainly from Roma friends with whom she has lived. Through frenetic editing, Shuruuk , which literally means "rising in the east", weaves a dreamlike journey that follows the movement of the sun, from Japan to Tunisia, from Palestine to the four corners of France. The camera rummages through the folds of reality to capture the faces of those with whom the artist navigates, to bear witness to the struggle for their daily survival as well as more specific manifestations in the face of state oppression. Amie Barouh intertwines the impressionist bursts with bursts of another gravity: violent and sudden police interventions, which take shape in the movement of the film, carried by a manifest vital impulse. The fragmentation of Shuruuk reflects the perpetual reconfiguration to which the lives of all these beings are subjected, humans, animals, like these bees that swarm while the tender words of Pierre Barouh resonate: "Today I am what I am, we are who we are, and all that is the sum of the pollen we have fed on."

Sob A Chama Da Candeia / By Candlelight (The Flame Of A Candle)

André Gil Mata

Northern Portugal. A large bourgeois house, its garden, its magnolia. As we know, the house is a place that cinema, this art of the outdoors, has often chosen to represent less the joys of family life than a deadly space. André Gil Mata made it his stage; with its rooms, its furniture, what is played out there, what has been played out there. From one room to another, from one era to another, the film digs into this closed space, like a sort of stifling box. The characters come and go, Alzira, more prisoner than real mistress of the place, Beatriz the servant. Class play and distribution of roles by gender. With the neighboring bell tower overhanging, a space is drawn that is as much a (old-fashioned) showcase as a vault (of desires, feelings), where the unsaid, the frustrations ooze out amidst the silences. From one era to another, we move to the rhythm of moments of restrained tension (here a silent confrontation, there a game with caged birds) as to that of the seasons – but do they really pass? With few words, gestures as if slowed down, and a few objects, here a dresser, there an old photo, traces of memories, life and affects, the film depicts a suspended time, with its new beginnings, its heaviness. While windows opening onto the outside reach us as if muffled and in fragments a distant world. Everything is played out in this hushed, confined space, sumptuously filmed in long enveloping shots, with rare and slow camera movements, like the quasi immobility of the figures, children included.

Sof Ma'arav

Yotam Ben-David

Yotam Ben-David was born and raised in Israel. He left his native country and now lives in Paris, in exile. He stages himself, a solitary male figure in his apartment, windows open on the city and its noise. Evening falls. Voices begin to come from somewhere else that is not outside. The printer, which was moving by itself on a stool, suddenly turns off. A power outage redoubles the darkness of the evening. The night that then opens is not only the opposite of day, but the site and the material of an inner experience, a metaphysical journey that leads the solitary inhabitant to the confines of himself. He chats on Skype with his grandfather, but when the computer turns off in turn there is only the reflection of his face on the black screen, between two candles. Daydream? Because his grandfather is dead. Talking to the dead is to bring back childhood memories to the country, but also to deplore what the rulers have done to the native country. End : the extremity and the end. The far west is Israel, a land first dreamed of, then projected by the West beyond itself. The grandfather is the incarnation of this old dream that has become a lost world, his death marks the end of a story that began on the rooftops of Babylon. But the end of the far west is also, necessarily, that of the West itself: a story of technology and conquests, colonial or spatial. The filmmaker's bedroom meditation is of this magnitude: metaphysical, historical, geopolitical. No history lesson, however: rather a painful and uncertain work of mourning. In the early morning, the birds sing, but points of light trace a vertical line in the Parisian sky, like rocket fire from the other end of the west. The dawn is deceptive: it is twilight.

The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich

A writer, teacher, feminist activist, pioneer of Afro-Surrealism and key member of the Négritude movement, Martinique-born Suzanne Césaire was a trailblazer who deserves greater attention and credit than she has ever received. Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich's fascination with her subject is seen in the research that went into the making of this film – including hours of audio interviews with Césaire's living children and family. But this is no mere biopic. Instead, Césaire's life is presented through an investigation by a group of filmmakers keen to grapple with the writer's life and legacy. Shifting between present and past, blurring the lines between the imagined and the biographical, the film homes in on Zita Hanrot's character, an actress and new mother haunted by voices as she prepares to play Césaire.
Hunt-Ehrlich, an artist and filmmaker renowned for delving into the inner worlds of Black women, delivers an absorbing exploration of a figure side-lined, if not completely erased, by history. The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire profits from Hunt-Ehrlich's fragmentary approach, acknowledging that the complexity of her character demands more than conventional hagiography. Noting how her husband Aimé's success in the political sphere eclipsed her achievements, the film aims to reassert her place as a radical voice and visionary.
– Vanja Kaludjercic

These Sounds Mark The Placements Of An Inner World

Julia Pello

What best characterizes a poet, every poet, is perhaps the extreme and singular intimacy that is created between the outside world and an inner world. This intimacy is the place of her poetry. Borrowing her title from Lorine Niedecker, Julia Pello has entrusted cinema with the task of finding this place, of giving it a sensitive form to share the work and life of the American poet. Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970) spent most of her life in a cabin on Black Hawk Island, near Fort Atkinson, a small town on the humid plains of Wisconsin. Her poetry was born from this withdrawal: discretion, sobriety, attention to those close to her, listening in silence. Julia Pello brings these qualities from the page to the screen by inviting the choreographer and performer Elise Cowin to invent gestures and movements to bring back Niedecker's presence and attention to these places. Hand gestures running through the collections of poems kept in the library and the museum. Slow-motion arabesques of the body in the space of the cabin. Words, fragments of poems are read, taken from the pages. But the outside world, at Fort Atkinson, is also the traces left in the earth more than a thousand years ago by an indigenous civilization. Traces also of the Indian wars, of a Native American History to which Julia Pello devotes the majority of her work as an artist ( Arrow , FID 2019). This History is frozen in a dead time, like the stuffed animals in the Fort Atkinson museum. The poetic time that opens up here between Niedecker's few words, between the images and sounds sparingly edited by Julia Pello, is the exact opposite of museum time: it makes room for the living and the dead, the living and the non-living.

Todo Documento De Civilización (Every Document Of Civilization)

Tatiana Mazú González

Every document of civilization is at the same time a document of barbarism. The phrase is from Walter Benjamin. Tatiana Mazú González takes up the beginning of it to title her film. "And the same barbarism that affects it, also affects the process of its transmission from hand to hand," continues the author. Against this barbarism, and to account for the struggles of individuals made invisible, erased from the writing of History, Tatiana Mazú González rises up. In Río Turbio (FID 2020), she went to war against the ostracization of women from the eponymous mining town. There, she takes up the case of the forced disappearance of Luciano Arruga, a teenager tortured and killed by the Buenos Aires police, to conduct a clinical and critical examination, meticulously dissecting the traces of the state crime. "Reality is a stratified mass grave; this film, a process of excavation," writes the director. Positioned at the intersection of General Paz and Mosconi avenues where the teenager was last seen, her camera, as if to detect the invisible, stubbornly scrutinizes the details of the landscape – asphalt, traffic lights, waste – which she brings together, through editing, with a whole corpus of iconography constituting the memory of the young man – archives of gatherings in his honor, graffiti, photos. In doing so, Tatiana Mazú González brings to light the truth of a counter-History, which the crystalline voice of Luciano's mother, an admirable tragic storyteller, hammers home with anaphora, nuances and silences. Against the barbarity of a transmission process that never ceases to obscure the vision of the "vanquished" (Benjamin) and to silence their words, there remain images, faces and stories, to which cinema, that is to say the montage of images, faces and stories, can still give substance, to restore all their power of protest.

Triton (Merman)

Ana Lungu

How is memory made? What remains of individual and collective stories? For this first work with and on archives, Ana Lungu takes us to Romania, mainly that of the Ceaucescu years. Initially, several image backgrounds, including one of her own family. What to do with this material, made in a context of political oppression? The family and private space, its secrets, their intricacies, will be the guide of this journey through time through the middle of the 20th century. But what can these images tell us? Certainly more and also possibly something other than what they show: between their very material and the off-screen that we guess, between the one who produced them and what they sometimes say against his will. In this oscillation, Ana Lungu, attentive but without fetishism, decides to redouble the fiction that they carry. Through the three moments selected – a child in the 1980s-90s, a music teacher from the 50s to the 80s (the communist era and its prohibitions), an aristocratic couple caught up in the Second World War – Merman takes us into the froth of these banal and unremarkable lives, into what they carry in terms of desires and fantasies (here a burning love, here the gaze of a father, there again the life of a bachelor), caught in the constraints and contradictions of their time as authors of the images. Ana Lungu breathes new life into these lives, reinvents them, in a dialectical movement questioning the false evidence of the story and the images. Between what we hear and what unfolds before our eyes, she only better restores their beauty, as well as the cruelty and violence of which they are alternately the sign or the tool.

Un Circulo Que Se Fue Rodando (A Circle That Rolled Away)

Liv Schulman

In this dizzying journey, in a few alert and unbound sequence shots, constituting a continuous band, the streets and passers-by follow one another, cross paths, leave, return in a frenetic coming and going. Bodies and words collide, words and discussions taken as an incessant flow, while the aphorisms (demanding or offbeat) written by the artist are caught on the fly, written on T-shirts that she spreads in the city, like so many points of resistance. Circulation, therefore, of bodies, ideas, flows. A choral film where the protagonists and the T-shirt wearers would oppose, like a long sentence in action, to the speeches and slogans constituting the capitalist space. The power of speech and its flashes of brilliance, by innervating the city, offer themselves as an antidote to this city (to our world?) which has become a devouring organism.

Una Sombra Oscilante (An Oscillating Shadow)

Celeste Rojas Mugica

Let's take a dark room. Celeste Rojas Mugica and her father Lucho lock themselves in it to develop images of the past. This past is Chile during the Pinochet years. Lucho Rojas was a photographer there but also an opponent of the regime, and therefore clandestine. His life oscillated between taking photos of the present and making himself invisible – between light and shadow. "The exercise consisted of, and still consists of: closing your eyes and imagining a place": the method and discipline of the clandestine. This sentence, the first in the dialogue between father and daughter that constitutes the framework of Une sombra oscilante , also formulates the theoretical hypothesis of the film: considering the image not from the point of view of the visible object, but from the faculty of imagination. In this singular dark room, development is no longer a solitary technical operation of revelation, but a poetic and political process of imagination for two. Developing the image means describing it not to exhaust its meaning but to flush out its parts of shadow, uncertainty, and therefore power. It is to extend it through words to imagine the story of the past, or to do it in one's head, with one's eyes closed, to project a future. The game is serious, but also very joyful: plastic inventions and ideas follow one another at an astonishing speed, all punctuated by an editing that combines freedom and rigor as rarely before. Brilliant and seductive, Una sombra oscilante profoundly renews the filmic approach to the photographic archive by inventing a cinematographic form that seems to be born from the very process of creating images – taking, developing. A dark chamber music, with four hands and two voices, draws the spectator into a captivating oscillation between the possible and the real, between what has been and what could have been, what is and what could be. In our dark times, here is a film that projects a light that is all the more joyful as it is intermittent – ​​it does not forget the shadow from which it comes.

Volver A Recorrer Las Mismas Calles (Retracing The Same Streets)

Beatriz Arias González

Gabriela has lost her dog Porro and is looking for him, helped by a childhood friend. The plot is as simple as pie, a beautiful pretext for setting off to meet a working-class neighborhood in Chile, of which Beatriz Arias paints a vivid portrait in colors, in a few sensitive, lively and precise strokes. The empathy that one can feel in the face of the dismay of the main protagonist remains in the background as the figure of the lost dog and the cinema share here in harmony and with joy the same movement: wandering. Of course, Porro is missing. But according to the canine point of view invented by Beatriz Arias, Porro is happy, returned to the sovereignty of his wandering pleasures of rummaging through trash cans or teasing a cat. And this is how the camera (and the spectator), freed from any narrative stake, can let themselves go to search the streets, to intrude into the interiors. And to pick up the soft grace of two young women who exchange a ball on a soccer field under a bright sun. That of the round arms of other women who prepare pies in a small kitchen. That of the smiles that a bingo evening brings together around large mixed tables. Here is a tender and sincere attention paid to simple gestures as to people, in which a nostalgia is also lodged. Whether the latter is for childhood or an immemorial plenitude, what seems to be sought in Volver a recorrer las mismas calles is ultimately not so much a dog as the way of being to grasp the fragile and vibrant poetry of the moment. Beatriz Arias composes an ode to the stray dog , and in doing so to wandering, the only one capable of putting us on the path of encounter and joy, of random surges "ahead of ourselves".

Voyage Au Bord De La Guerre (Voyage Along the War)

Antonin Peretjatko

Within the first month of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, more than 12.5 million people were forced to flee their homes and 5 million fled the country altogether. Documentary filmmaker Antonin Peretjatko returns to Lviv with Andrei, who has left with his family for France, to retrieve Andrei's personal belongings and to explore his own roots, but most importantly to record eyewitness testimony from people who have remained in Ukraine. Part reportage documentary and part poetic road movie with an aesthetic style reminiscent of the early French New Wave, Voyage Along the War tries to share with the viewer what everyday life looks like in a war-torn country.

XXL

Sawandi Groskind Kim Ekberg

In a quest to pursue her final living dream of becoming an actress, Magda travels to Helsinki for an audition. She invites her brother along on the trip, in an effort to heal their fractured relationship.

How Azure Is Dying

Egor Skorokhodov

An old man observes the world of mountains under the azure sky. He sees the birds singing, his mad wife crying, his children walking, a crippled man sitting, the wind blowing and the azure sky dying and reviving itself…Who will ever close his eyes?
Emil Nolde, Geog Trakl, Joan Mitchell… Many painters have studied blue, in its subtlety and nuances. Egor Skorokhodov is part of this pictorial research, striving to depict the color variations of a Caucasian sky in a film-world where plenitude and harmony reign. The transposition to the cinema involves a series of fixed shots, which combine the majestic views of the mountains of Adjara, in Georgia, with the details of a living nature and the gestures of its inhabitants. The film thus embraces all the lives that inhabit these places, animals, trees, rocks, streams, humans. The arrangement of life flows against a backdrop of a palette of thick and saturated azures and can be heard in a teeming soundtrack that plays with bursts and silences. While outside, an opaque mist caresses the tops of the fir trees, the bright eyes of an old man with chiseled features pierce the darkness of an interior barely lit by the blue light of dawn. The presence of humans – more archetypes than characters – and the expression of their feelings are indicated by touches, amplified off-screen, intensified by the vibration of the image through the hypnotic decomposition of certain gestures. Thus of these bare feet that strike against the ground as if to make the day fall in breathless jerks and bring us back to the depth of darkness. From night to night, Egor Skorokhodov invites us to contemplation. And if for the time of a shot he reverses the horizon, thus translating the movement of the earth, it is perhaps to make us experience that of the sky and its colors: how the azure dies.

ユリシーズ (Ulysses)

Hikaru Uwagawa

In Madrid, a young Russian woman has been living alone with her eight-year-old son since his father left them to "look for treasure". In San Sebastian, a Japanese traveller meets a young Basque woman; they spend time together, she introduces him to her friends, knowing full well that he will leave one day. In Maniwa, a young man returns to his family, on the occasion of an Obon ceremony prepared in honour of his grandfather. Each story, autonomous, follows the other.

'Lolo & Sosaku' The Western Archive

Sergio Caballero

Lolo & Sosaku are two sound artists, from Argentina and Japan, who have been collaborating in Barcelona since 2004. With a combination of self-made instruments and cheeky contraptions, they create sound sculptures: machines and installations whose mechanical, repetitive noises can madden or enchant. They take the 'automatism' of art to new extremes.
Director Sergio Caballero (whose debut feature, Finisterrae, won the 2011 Tiger Award) turns the two artists into the atypical heroes of a surreal Western filled with gorgeous landscapes and absurdist humour. Attired in cowboy hats, the duo roams the desert in search of objects and tools – executing compulsive actions with them or arranging them in strange combinations.
'Lolo & Sosaku' The Western Archive offers a curious reinterpretation of the Western genre by mixing it with slow cinema and art documentary. From time to time, the action is interrupted, the landscape changes and we are presented with snippets of a sound installation in its usual exhibition spaces. This flow between the fiction and the artistic object invites us to see the film as a portrait of the artists' mental landscape, or even as an allegory of their creative process.
– Cristina Álvarez López
Lolo and Sosaku will be at IFFR for their live performance The End, which serves as the climactic conclusion to the film.

Arfuyen Au Loin (Arfuyen In The Distance)

Katharina Bellan

Between 2014 and 2017, like others keep a notebook or send postcards, the painter Jean-Pierre Bellan filmed the flowers in his garden on his iPad, in short vignettes commented in voiceover and sent to his loved ones. After his death, his daughter put them together like others make a wreath or a bouquet. In counterpoint, she films her children on film during their own daily discipline: music, which also irrigates the soundtrack even when it is not visible in the image. In voiceover, the reminiscences of each of them compose the portrait in absence of the deceased, and of his daily practice of a poetry of description as care for the world.

Before It Is Too Late

Mathieu Amalric

The Emerson String Quartet, after 47 years of music together, recorded their last album Infinite Voyage. For this farewell, the string quartet invited the soprano Barbara Hannigan and a film was born. Their precise and inhabited work, the moments of enthusiasm and fear, the research and the jokes, the age limit of these men and the flamboyance of this woman who feed off each other, the admiring friendship full of irony and rigor, the profession and yet the discovery, humor as a cog towards concentration, the individual and the group… all this composes a portrait of the usually invisible musical production. Before each one resumes his path.

Boomerang (2024)

Maider Fortuné

The inner courtyard of the Canebière building, built by Fernand Pouillon in 1952 as a vision of quality popular housing. The camera slowly follows the vertical and horizontal lines of the windows. Traces of human habitation punctuate the uniformity of the façade (linen, potted plants). The rhythm syncopates, accelerates: pendulum movements follow the panoramic shots, the hubbub of footsteps and voices in the hall begins a crescendo. The screen goes black, and James Baldwin's voice speaks in French about the place that French society grants to Algerians. Between the visual part without words and the spoken part without images, a thread: the legacy of popular struggles within French society, of their demand for dignity and equality.

Brains (2024)

Philippe Petit

In this intimate, sentimental, but also burlesque road movie, Philippe leaves to join his mother, who suffers from a degenerative neuronal disease. But the floods slow down the train journey, and as the journey progresses, mental images and memories, filmed over time, collide with the present and sketch out Bernadette's aging in dotted lines. Reunions punctuate the filmmaker's medical-picaresque journey: his brother, friends lost from sight and reconnected, with whom each conversation is an opportunity to take stock of the time that passes and the paths traveled, of the common that remains as well as the acceptance of life and its accidents.

Die Blaue Blume Im Land Der Technik (The Blue Flower In The Land Of Technology)

Albert García-Alzórriz

"In the land of technology, the spectacle of immediate reality has been transformed into an unobtainable blue flower" – W. Benjamin's phrase guides and haunts Albert García-Alzórriz in his rigorous dissection of the relationship between medicine and image. With a precise gaze and meticulous composition, the director offers three variations to think about the relationships between the human body, medical technology and aesthetic representation. The camera crosses the aseptic space of the hospital and reveals a disturbing contiguity between the gazes of machines and those of humans, the gestures of surgeons and those of robots. This film is a fascinating and questioning dive into the world of medical technology, which seems to cancel the distance between the body and its representation.

On The Orouet Side (Near Orouet)

Jacques Rozier

Three young girls escape from Paris to spend the month of September on the Vendée coast. Gilbert, a slightly awkward office manager, arrives in the middle of the trio. Finally restored the sunny and colorful masterpiece by Jacques Rozier.

Ferne Stimmen (Distant Voices)

Annik Leroy Julie Morel

Ferne Stimmen : distant voices. That of Hannah Arendt, whose poem written in 1942 in honor of Walter Benjamin is read in voiceover over images of sections of walls and deserted streets of an abandoned village: Oradour-sur-Glane. That of Ulrike Meinhof too, evoking the place of women in political commitment or the survival of fascism in post-war Germany, while one of them sits in a cell reminiscent of the activist's. Two German women who fought Nazism or its thought; two evocations of state violence and the struggles it engenders; two off-center frames that in turn overlap, contaminate and fertilize each other in a palimpsest of eras and resistances.

La Prunelle Rouge

Pierre Louapre

In an abandoned archaeological site in the heart of Marseille, the director records the traces left by passing inhabitants, in the fortuitous beauty of the mattresses and blankets piled up he finds an echo of the recumbent figures. We thus enter the universe of Pierre Louapre, in his research around the blind spots of our daily geographies: wastelands, ruins, squats. His gaze rests on the footprints left by those who are sent back to these remote places, as well as on the objects that keep their intimate memory. In a gesture of personal and free cinema, Pierre Louapre fixes the hidden and ephemeral grace of these spaces of otherness that flourish in the cracks of norms and control.

The Song Of The Pylons

Teano Horn Léo Bayle

Catherine misses her Flixbus and finds herself stuck on a motorway service station, somewhere in the south of France. Resigning herself to getting by, she sets off on foot along the motorway, crossing industrial landscapes where she meets the Marseille pharaoh. This mystical and buffoonish figure takes her to the wasteland areas of the peri-urban world, explored in wide shots that stretch the distances and the emptiness of spaces. Catherine meets crooked bosses, techno-beat Tesla drivers, comes across a ceremony dedicated to the mysterious catfish man whose arrival so many devotees await... A picaresque journey into the imagination of the margins, folkloric fantasies revisited through the prism of a post-industrial society in full decay.

Lišejníky (Lichens are the Way)

Ondřej Vavrečka

A close-up study of radically different life forms that puts our own human scale in a new and thought-provoking light. Lichens are amazing organisms. A combination of a fungus and algae, two life forms that once upon a time decided to enter into symbiosis with each other. Fungi have difficulty photosynthesising and algae have difficulty incorporating sugar. Therefore, their union is beneficial for both parties. Or in other words: It is better to live together than to live alone. 'Lichens are the Way' is a loving and thought-provoking close-up study of radically different life forms, and of what happens when we turn our attention to beings and life forms outside our own scale. Czech Ondřej Vavrečka shot his radically imaginative, organic film in Canada, where lichenologist Trevor and his partner have created a home together in the symbiotic spirit of the object of their studies.

Mondongo: Material And Work

Mariano Llinas

Situation 1: Mondongo, a duo of Argentinian artists, creates a work inspired by The Art of Colors, a treatise by Johannes Itten. Situation 2: a filmmaker begins their portrait.

Naked Acts

Bridgett M. Davis

Cicely is cast in an indie film, one she considers much more tasteful than the Blaxploitation films her mother made. But when she's suddenly supposed to appear nude, she must confront the same problems. Bridgett M. Davis' sole fiction feature: a legend of Black US cinema.

Normandy (2024)

Vadim Kostrov

The ocean fills the screen. It will be in almost every shot here, most often immense, unmissable. After establishing his rhythm, in long fixed shots allowing all the variations of shimmering and changes in luminosity to unfold, Vadim Kostrov welcomes a couple of Russian friends into his film, who have come to visit him in France. Their conversations are almost inaudible, melted into the murmur of the sea they are contemplating: a way of interweaving human history with the environment it inhabits, of giving the sound of the waves and the expression of a voice equal dignity. Landscape as a resource in the face of uprooting.

More Than Yesterday, Less Than Tomorrow

Laurent Achard

After a long absence, Sonia unexpectedly returns to her family. Her return brings back painful memories. In a restored version, the great first film by Laurent Achard, who recently passed away.

Mondongo Report (Portrait Of Mondogo)

Mariano Llinas

A cinematic portrait. At one point in the film, the filmmaker types on his computer screen: "Every portrait is a self-portrait." There is no narcissism in this statement, just a technical fact: the photographic portrait has an off-screen and, in the case of cinema, movement is added to the off-screen. The portraitist does not need to project his subjectivity onto the model, in the old pictorial way. The mere presence of the off-screen makes the positions of the portraitist and the portraited dependent, intertwined with each other. It takes at least two people to make a film. The people represented in this film, the two Argentinian artists who make up the Mondongo collective, are also professional portraitists. For the filmmaker who attempts to portray them, this means a particularly intense negotiation. A portrait can also precipitate the breakup of a friendship, and it will be further proof of the necessary bond – and this is why it can be broken – between the portraitist and the model.

Saying Not Said

Christina Stuhlberger

Joy, an elderly woman, confides in Cebuano about her youth to Sarah, her daughter sitting next to her and holding her hand. Vivian, also a Filipina, translates Joy's words, her friend, for her daughter Christina, who does not speak Cebuano. The tenderness of the looks and gestures emerges, within the shot and between shots, and the learning by women of the cinematographic device, which they do not know and which they appropriate by confiding in each other. Two mother-daughter pairs, two exchanges between languages ​​and generations. From one to the other, the portrait of a missing woman and her story emerges, of language as a permitted or prevented filiation, of the collected word and the conditions required to welcome it properly and make it circulate.

Spuren von Bewegung vor dem Eis (Traces of Movement Before the Ice)

René Frölke

The film gives brief glimpses into rooms bathed in light. The Bolex camera whirs. Twenty years after the closure of Swiss publishing house Pendo, which was founded in 1971, its story is revealed by way of personification: heir Theresia Weigner and her partner, who repeatedly circle, examine and lose sight again of this legacy with all the weight it carries. Here articles of memory are piled high, cared for, stashed away. Remaining stock, no longer hot off the press, but still packaged up for sale, unfinished manuscripts, cover designs, cassettes, office supplies, correspondence and tax documents are all laid out like in a time capsule: books by Margarete Mitscherlich, Dorothee Sölle, Dom Hélder Câmara, illustrated volumes about Robert Lax or the Sihl Valley. René Frölke's film gives a structure to this archive and becomes a simple chamber of wonders. He finds his own annotations within the inner pull exerted by the artefacts and accompanies these stubborn, overwhelmed preservers on their way through their everyday life amid the piles of material. Written elements from the film script also play a part.
At the end of the corridor, jazz music sounds from a small radio.

Suspension (2024)

Claire Doyon

Three years after Penelope my love (FID2021), Claire Doyon gives news of her daughter, a young autistic mute adult. She does so by way of a letter addressed to other parents, responsible for a place of life where Penelope, ultimately, will not live. The letter formulates the reason for this decision: a disagreement on the mode of reception, that is to say the creation of a common for beings who are prevented from expressing their desire by the deprivation of speech. In a reflex learned from Deligny, Claire Doyon questions the good ethical conscience to reveal its normative unthought and to turn the questions around: What is a free gesture? What conditions the slightest gesture? What do we lack, to be up to Penelope's gestures and joy? While on the screen, printed over the days on the 8mm film, these gestures and this joy, their brilliance magnified by the editing, impose the enigma of their obviousness.

Was There To Be A Man Who Was My Assistant? - Why Was The Man Who Was My Assistant? (What Should One Do. - In Delight?)

Astrid Johanna Ofner

Love itself is more important than the object that inspires it, writes one woman to another. One is Rosa Luxemburg, a political prisoner. The other is her closest friend, Sophie Liebknecht.

(A Stone's Throw) على مرمى حجر

Razan AlSalah

Amine, a Palestinian elder, is exiled twice from land and labour. He is displaced from his birthplace Haifa seeking refuge in Beirut, and again to Zirku Island, for work on an offshore oil platform and work camp in the Arab Gulf. "A Stone's Throw" trespasses borders to reveal an emotional and material proximity between the extraction of oil and labour in the region and the Zionist colonization of Palestine. The film rehearses a history of the Palestinian resistance when, in 1936, the oil labourers of Haifa blow up a BP pipeline.
—Razan AlSalah