FIDMarseille 2022

Another time is possible! At least that is the case in the early days of industrial clockmaking in Switzerland in around 1877, when the disparity between the authorities, manufacturers and models gives rise to parallel temporal dimensions, each with their own timetable, values and ideology. In this proto-Taylorist society, where dignitaries and their gendarmes control the exact time and dictate the rhythms of production and community, a group of workers form an anarchist union in association with the First International federation of workers' groups. This is where Josephine, who is in charge of assembling the movement, the heart of the mechanical watch, meets the Russian cartographer Pyotr Kropotkin, who is currently in the Jura valleys. Inspired by anarchist ideas, they demand the liberation of time and counter the values of the marketplace and nationalism with solidarity and pacifism.
After his debut THOSE WHO ARE FINE, Schäublin continues to refine his style, which combines meticulous composition – both in his characteristic wide shots as well as in the extreme close-ups celebrating manual labour – with a distinct political stance that uses distancing and humour to enhance the topicality and universality of the story.

On the French Polynesian island of Tahiti, De Roller, the High Commissioner of the Republic—a French government official—is a calculating man with flawless manners. His somewhat broad perception of his role sees him navigating both high-end, establishment locales, as well as shadier venues where he mingles with the locals especially since a persistent rumour has surfaced: a submarine has been sighted, and its ghostly presence could herald the return of the nuclear testing halted by France in the 1990s.

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

A single mother and a married man become lovers. Committed to seeing each other only for fun and not feeling any romantic feelings, they are more and more surprised by their complicity

In 2022, Mantas Kvedaravičius went back to Ukraine, Mariupol, at the heart of the war, to be with the people he had met and filmed in 2015. Following his death, his producers and collaborators have put all their strength into continuing transmitting his work, his vision and his films. Also a PhD in anthropology, Mantas Kvedaravičius wished to testify as a filmmaker as far as possible from the agitation of the media and the politicians. With huge force and sensitivity, MARIUPOLIS 2 depicts life as it continues amidst the bombing and reveals images that convey both tragedy and hope.

Failing to bring them together, Mitra Farahani instigates a visual, sound, and written correspondence between two artists: the writer and filmmaker Ebrahim Golestan, a key figure in Iranian culture, and Jean-Luc Godard, a legendary filmmaker living in Rolle. For 29 weeks, every Friday, we put ourselves on stage, not without humor and foresight.

In Orpheus (FID 2021), Vadim Kostrov returned, as a young adult, to the city of his youth: Nizhny Tagil, an industrial city in the Urals. A year later, he returns to the same city again, but in a completely different time. Little Vadim, ten years old, wears a schoolbag and a yellow cap. Tall Vadim follows his wanderings from shot to shot, day and night, in the changing light of early autumn. Zooms, superimpositions, velvety DV, variations in focus, Vadim Kostrov works with shapes and colors like a solitary painter. The child guides the filmmaker he has become through the thickness of time. Leaves and steel merge into the same rusty color. If the Soviet tank, a monument to the glory of local industry, is just another game for the schoolboy who rides its cannon, the young and melancholic filmmaker does without commentary to deposit darker and more painful harmonies in the image.

"This story is true. I give it as it is, with embellishments." This sentence, the keystone of A Woman Escapes , is by Audrey Benac and diverts the famous opening line of Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped. Sofia Bohdanowicz's alter ego, lonely and grieving, Audrey wanders through the Parisian apartment of her recently deceased friend Juliane. Over views of Istanbul, Burak's deep voice evokes a package received by mistake, intended for Audrey/Sofia, sent by a certain Blake: a small 3D camera. Images of the young woman on a bus speeding through the landscape then mark the beginning, not only of a correspondence, but of a film that makes circulation – images, sounds, dreams – its driving force. The voices of the three characters mingle with the interlacing of stereoscopic views, 16mm film grain, and 4K images, in an exchange articulated according to the motif of braiding – like the challah cooked by Audrey. As announced in the opening, A Woman Escapes abandons Bressonian austerity and fully embraces the ornaments of its fiction – detours and artifices, profusion of images and colors. Quotation and reuse are the logic of staging this palimpsest film, as seems to be illustrated by the first letter sent by Blake to Audrey, which describes Nam June Paik's Zen for Film , a work in constant reinvention as alterations and dust accumulate on a blank film. Cards that range from blue to red (the colors of 3D glasses) through a whole range of magentas, from the first images showing Juliane's gestures to the last, where these same gestures are repeated by Audrey, A Woman Escapes draws a trajectory that seems to make cinema a manifesto for healing.

In late August, Léna, 25, arrives in Arles to meet up with Marius from a past holiday romance. He's late. Whilst waiting for him, she meets Maurice, a seasonal baker, who introduces her to his friend Ali, a nice guy who's sometimes in Arles. Marius eventually turns up and all four of them bond over the chance encounter and spontaneous complicity, and meet up the following two summers in Normandy and then Ibiza. With light-hearted nonchalance, the film crystallises the magic of long summers in a sunny tableau with bright, shimmering colours, portraying the charm of footloose romance. The directors play around with the motifs of New Wave- inspired French cinema that enjoys recreating the variations of amorous banter. The conversations, interpreted by this quartet of jubilant actors, reveal youth caught between minor and major concerns – should they have children? Go out to sea? Follow love? Only Léna, navigating between the three boys, seems to know what she wants and where she's going. Following in the wake of Jacques Rozier, DYING IN IBIZA smells of sea air and salty spray. The sea, shot in its exquisite palette of blues from the English Channel to the Mediterranean, is omnipresent, a place of escapades, conquests and the promise of departure. While the film relies mainly on the authentic chatter and verve of its characters, speech gradually gives way to song. The trio of directors is anything but faint-hearted, going as far as capturing the energy of musicals to substitute the words with refrains that describe the emotions of journeys so well. Like Lena leaning against the rail of the ferry "that never stops not coming back", to quote from a well-known French song, it's with emotion and delight that we discover this promising work that's gazing out to the horizon. (Louise Martin Papasian)

Ramiro is a cook in a bar. Hernán is an unemployed technician. Nora is a nurse in a public hospital. Lucía is an employee in a bookstore. Four stories and a black and white city with a cloudy sky. None of them know each other, they are only inhabitants of the same city.

The director comes into possession, through a serendipitous internet purchase, of a roll of 16mm film belonging to an unknown family. This film becomes an investigation, through a post-colonial perspective, using digital tools and the clues that the film offers, to deconstruct and investigate the origin of the material and the socio-political and historical context that surrounds it, namely the Apartheid in South Africa.

A General Disappointment offers an existential meditation in three chapters based on a text combined with a series of long static shots. These depict director Serge Garcia in everyday situations that distill a depressive burlesque, where the banal turns to absurdity and weighs down the solitary body of the character. In counterpoint to this ordinary and silent daily life, the text appears as a subtitle, an inner voice that recalls, through the narration of comical anecdotes, the caustic excesses of a Woody Allen or a Larry David. The simplicity of the logorrheic device of A General Disappointment is matched only by its marvelous precision and reflective density. After Grand Central Hotel (FID 2021), Serge Garcia once again constructs a cinematic object in the service of discourse, and finds in the care of framing and the bet on their duration the springs to bring literature – his own and that of, among others, Kathryn Scanlan – and philosophical thought – Lauren Berlant. While Serge Garcia, sitting at the wheel of a stopped car, shovels into himself a plate of noodles worthy of the most gloomy hours of a cop on stakeout in a bad thriller, the text invites reflection on the organized failures of capitalist societies and the vanity of their promises of happiness and self-fulfillment. The sketches go back and forth from the street to the bedroom, a movement reaffirming the intimate as political and the necessary analysis of our most personal affects (feelings of inadequacy, frustrations, neuroses) as produced and standardized. Over a close-up of an amp, the voice of Laurene LaVallis, a short-lived singer from the 80s, reverses the process of concentration, from reading to full listening, as a possibility of reappropriating a body in the present. Without ostentation, Serge Garcia simply creates a presence in the world and in oneself.

With I Also Love Politics , Marie Voignier extends the attention paid from film to film to the territories where imagination, historical depths and present issues intertwine, from post-communist East Germany ( Hinterland , FID 2009) to Africa ( The Mokele Mbembé Hypothesis , FID 2011, Tinselwood , FID 2017). While borders are closing more than they are opening, becoming less points of passage than obstacles and zones of fixation, here we are at a nearby border, in the Roya Valley, on the heights of Nice, between France and Italy. Opening: in the distance, a bridge. Two silhouettes. A few words. As we will have understood, the issue here will be the encounter and the welcome. But what is hospitality? Solidarity? Not so simple. The challenge will be to make room for listening to those who welcome us, for their reflections on what is at stake, for oneself, for others. A question of gesture, then, as much as of words. Words in action and anchored, like those of this man busy in his orchard who evokes the sharing of his garden as the Earth, or of this other volunteer recounting, at the wheel of her car, the transport of three young women. From one testimony to the next, a film emerges about movement, geography, and what moves us internally, between this supposed inside and this outside world that shakes us up. Hence the insistence on filming in and from cars, and these landscapes, seen from the train or through the windows of the prepared rooms. A decisive reverse shot, an exchange between two Sudanese refugees turned volunteers punctuates the film. A play of borders, of shifting positions, of hasty assignments thwarted, as evidenced by the final conversation, in the form of a rebound.

After some misunderstanding, Sakaguchi is hired to make a tourist guide video on Tobako (a fictitious name for Kawaguchi) in the outskirts of Tokyo. This element in the script sparks off a fanciful wandering strewn with unexpected meetings. First with Kitagawa, thanks to whom Sakaguchi landed the job. Then with a seamstress, and then with Yoshino, with whom a half-hearted romance emerges. Thus the narrative unfolds, in halts and swerves, espousing unexpected meetings, and offering the strolling character an opportunity for displacements from one place to the next. The deserted town has come to a standstill – the shooting took place during the lockdown – and this acts as a metaphor for the idleness of the characters. GARDEN SANDBOX is light and nimble, whereas its main character hasa limp. Her demeanour and her stiff body exude a peculiar quality, somewhat comically at odds with the setting. Apathetically playing along, the young woman gleans from each character some pieces of information about the town and, then, touch by touch she delineates its picture: ultimately, the place comes acrossas a post-industrial locale whose foundries are now obsolete. Sakaguchi's very meanderings lead her to a rich family's house for a sewing lesson. In this pivotal scene, the lady of the house invites her to don an upper-class wedding dress. Through a gesture both radical and powerful, which itself informs the dynamic of the film as a whole, a gleeful snip of the scissors transforms the item of clothing into the ultimate chic of haute-couture design. What weaves together this truant escape whose motifs and fabric seem inspired by Jacques Rozier's films, a crumbling industrial heritage and the transforming of a traditional wedding dress? With GARDEN SANDBOX, whose title is a reference to the type of sand used in the foundries, joyfully and playfully, Yukinori Kurokawa interrogates the concepts of mutation and (re)use as sources of boundless possibilities.

In the midst of a snowstorm, a journalist dives back into the memories of her most recent investigation. Following the sudden departure of star figure skater Violeta Martinez, the journalist travels to Violeta's hometown, a tropical village on the West coast of Mexico. There, she encounters an intricate labyrinth of clues and wrong paths, surreal tales and enigmatic characters. Two in particular draw her attention. But even as the story deviates from her initial quest, she shall only glimpse this world from a distance.

A meditation on the magic and danger of taking a bath.

Kristina is a transgender sex worker in Serbia. She plays herself in a film of the same name that modestly depicts her daily life in a fictional way. We are at her home, with her. Incredibly elegant, she enjoys creating ikebanas under the luxurious, baroque shade of her garden. The surprisingly shrill ringing of her phone disrupts the perfect scene. Kristina explains the pricing of her services to her interlocutor. In the following shots, in an interior that matches her elegance, armed with a large fan that she gracefully displays, she awaits her client. Upon his arrival, she confidently and superbly orders that their shoes be removed and a shower taken. The sobriety and delicacy of her life contradict all the clichés surrounding her profession. As close as possible to its character, the film embraces her placidity and proceeds with a quiet sovereignty, in a succession of tableaux with impeccably crafted framing and compositions, like a series of icons with Kristina at the center. Kristina is a believer. When she looks for the most suitable place in her home to accommodate a small crucifix, the ringing of her telephone once again cuts her endeavor short. In doing so, Nikola Spasic stages the tension that inhabits Kristina between the possibility of living her faith and the exercise of an activity that, according to religious and social doxa, contradicts it. Tracing an inner journey in the secret calm of churches and forests, the film also opens at its heart a space for confession, in frontal shots where Kristina tells her story. It does not, however, take the path of repentance. On the contrary, it affirms the profound freedom of a modern woman, captured in majesty in a bold portrait with lines inspired by iconostases that open onto the divine.

Pierre Guyotat, at home, between 2002 and 2009: scenes from the life of a writer. First, he organizes his library: each book is subject to commentary, reminiscences, and questioning. Then we see him at work, preparing with an assistant the edition of his Notebooks based on manuscripts from the 1960s. Finally, we find him in his room, sitting on his bed, discussing the Kings of France and then developing a text aloud, in a captivating self-dictation. Because Pierre Guyotat gives himself without restraint or embellishment to the unadorned attention of Jacques Kébadian, this most precious film allows us to experience as rarely before the intimacy of a writer's life: his work and his passion.

In 1973, the MLAC (Movement for the Freedom of Abortion and Contraception) was created. Certain medical procedures, then clandestine regarding abortion, could be filmed for information and self-training for women. In Le Passage du col , the actress and director Marie Bottois stages the insertion of an IUD on her own body. With humor and visual rigor, she precisely continues the militant and feminist line of Y'a qu'à pas baiser (Carole Roussoupolos, 1971). Her film thus stands out as a document, a piece of history, at a time when the right of women to control their bodies and to have an abortion is being undermined throughout the world.

Picking up, hanging up an old telephone receiver: the actor-director repeats the same gesture over and over, the sound engineer chains together takes. We are on the set of Declan Clarke's latest opus, What are the wild waves saying? (FID 2022). Lingering on the sound of an almost entirely silent film: economy of attention, attention to detail. Serge Garcia edits a succession of sequences denoting frenetic activity, which culminates in collective silence and listening to the take. Until Declan Clarke confides, in voiceover, his intellectual and artistic lineage, the matrix of the moments of work and observation arranged here.

Zehn Minutent vor Mitternacht poses a question: how do we encounter others? Like an invitation to rediscover Levinas's thought, the film traces a path toward a face, a revelation of infinity and the locus of all humanity. A striking feature: a soft, masculine voice addresses a man named Pascal off-camera. His delivery is hesitant. The words stumble and search for each other in rudimentary German. From the thickness of the mumbled words emerges the presence of bodies pulled from the darkness in fragments electrified by beams of blue light. They dance. The camera captures the diversity of bodies and faces that make up the RambaZamba Theater troupe. Some display the distinctive features of Down syndrome. One shot lingers on the face of a young boy whose tics and extreme mobility of features we perceive as signs of a disability. The film thus creates a sense of confusion: who owns the voiceover that delivers this fragile complaint? Is it that of the young boy? She tells us that Pascal, to whom she dedicates her words, has left the theater troupe and is a musician. From the blue vapors of a concert hall, the handsome face and massive body of the young boy emerge in a musical epiphany. To the ear, the heavy, deep sound of 21 DownBeat, his band. We understand that he is Pascal, to whom Mario Sanz is speaking. Thus is revealed the delicate tour de force of the film: the director has entangled Pascal's presence with his own voice, in the exposed precariousness of a stumbling diction. Through the moving apparitions, Mario Sanz reverses the stakes of the portrait, gracefully reversing its movement. The director, having to resign himself to never seeing his character again, turns his disappearance into a philosophical and perceptive experience. A remarkable and poetic lesson in the gaze, Zehn Minuten vor Mitternacht restores its subject to the full enigma of otherness and leaves us with the original encounter with "this Other as face," irreducible, which always eludes us.

We know these United States of the marginalized or the downtrodden, of the white low-middle class. Rob Rice sets up his camera there, attentive to a small community gathered around a family. This family survives as best it can in a shack surrounded by bric-a-brac, stuck on the side of a road between city and desert, the railway not far away, in a space without qualities near Los Angeles. This immersion is achieved through the detour of fiction, Rice choosing to attribute to the initial couple an invented daughter, and to make her the beginning and pivot of the story. The chronicle follows in the footsteps of direct cinema, with its mobile camera and the sketches as if caught on the fly. In this familiar setting of white proletarian America, with pool games, and as a backdrop carcasses of cars and other stripped-down caravans, fiction weaves before our eyes a generous story, giving substance to this society of invisibles so often covered in clichés. Far from any judgment, without any flourish, Rob Rice takes care of each of his characters. Assisted by this small troupe, a community brought together by the film, Rice draws destinies captured in the ordinary of life and its pitfalls. The illness—the very real one of the father—is a drama that haunts the film and leads it towards an unexpected closure. Between epic drama and the construction of visibility, this first film is carried by the sumptuous and melancholic beauty of its twilight images.

A young man walks into winter, to try to overcome his own prohibitions: a love encounter with another man, and a search for the absolute and for a Christian spirituality. GPS Signal Lost tells about his inner journey, combining Jura snowy landscapes, a medieval courtly novel, and a gay dating app on a smartphone.
Shot on black and white Super 8 mm, and built like a suspended mobile, the film is
a meditative quest that alternates between the present time and a very distant
past.
Special mention for the Georges de Beauregard National Prize, FID Marseille 2022

Dying is an adventure, the last one, and we lived it. But what's great is that we have added this film project like a future. Michel was involved right up until the end... and I can hear him telling me "there is no end". The music of the living is played there, of which we are all, in our place of presence, an invented note.

Bernardo Zanotta, a young Brazilian director, crafts a spirited and exhilarating queer farce that relies on the pure pleasure of cinematic image making: frame, colors, patterns, bodies. A comical opening, straight out of an 80s erotic film, sets the tone: dialogue at zero level, a plot reduced to a car getaway pitting in shot-reverse shot a frail man, the ideal prey, against a sultry and fatal woman. Shot on 16mm film, INSIEME INSIEME has the charm of its chromo, its colorful characters, its textured and shimmering colors clinging to the lipstick of Cécilia, a languid drag queen who sighs with pleasure on the other end of the line. Actors Lydia Giordano, Gustavo Jahn, and Jun Ortega wander as a trio through the meanders of a cinephile and literary memory. Throughout a story that freely combines quotes (Plato's Phaedo, Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons ) and homages to cinema – Antonioni in particular – Bernardo Zanotta mixes languages ​​(English, French, Italian), eras and motifs taken from different registers (romance, black comedy, slasher, gore film, B-movie, etc.). Libertinage is indeed the driving force of this film, which moves forward, versatile, with jumps in the editing like mood swings, constantly freeing itself from the seriousness of the plot and respect for genres. When it depicts a threesome in the shower, sadistic pleasures, a murder, it in no way gives in to the raw nudity of a voyeuristic frontality. The film indeed claims the artifice of cinema through abrupt interruptions, elliptical framing, and heavy-handed acting that mocks itself. And if INSIEME INSIEME summons the specter of death, it is only to better thwart the tragedy of life in a world of idleness, where the whimsical is still the surest path to pleasure

Quarries follows the mysteries surrounding prehistoric stone tools from Kenya alongside the neglected labor of stonemasons who paved the streets of Lisbon. The humble gesture of these artisans, stooped over the pavement, morphs into a confrontation with the hubristic act of monument building. For the artist's brother, the struggle to regain the use of his hands after a serious injury transforms into a narrative about agency in the face of being forgotten, marginalized and deemed of no importance. An out-of-print photography book on Portuguese stone pavements leads to a series of improbable connections. A tour of a neurobiology lab leads to an examination of a Cold War re-education camp where prisoners were forced to dig up stones to create replicas of antiquity while covertly drawing on stone shards to mark and then bury a trace of their stories. In Quarries, Ga extracts stories of resistance from unlikely places and on overlooked surfaces.

Stories can overlap and overlap. This provides the material for stories, myths, and builds the intensity of places, real or fictional. For Brent Chesanek, it begins with the skulls, present in the same area, of two Powells, who are complete opposites but whose paths cross for the film in a reimagined village. One, Lewis Powell, a pro-slavery assassin, conspired under a series of pseudonyms to overthrow the American government in 1865, in order to preserve institutional slavery after the defeat of the South. The other Powell, named Bill, a famous anti-colonial Seminole rebel, abandoned his Western name and fought the settlers under the name Osceola in the 1830s, while the indigenous populations were being displaced from newly acquired Florida. Crossing threads and stories, Brent Chesanek takes us into a land inhabited by ghosts. Heteronymous play and sliding draw a history and a geography in this territory that thickens and gains a whole new density. Crossing the humidity of the Florida landscapes, by day or between dog and wolf, the gaze is transformed by the collage and stratification of stories and voices, including that of an unexpected and metamorphosed Marco Polo, inscribed here as a matrix gesture of travel stories. Brent Chesanek thus reconstructs this piece of land according to the codes of explorers. This judicious detour allows the village to become the archetype of a broader American identity. The stacking and weaving draw a national history of white supremacy and European colonialism, foundations of the United States national narrative that remain strongly rooted to this day.

Marwa Arsanios' trilogy Who Is Afraid of Ideology? weaves an intersectional path through the struggles of women − in places such as Northern Syria and Colombia − to claim the right to the land and to reconnect with nature in an unmediated way. Part 3 Micro Resistancies takes place in Tolimo, and focuses on the ongoing systemic war waged by transnational corporations against the smallest and the most essential element of life − the seed. (Övül Ö. Durmusoglu)

Thirty-five years after Keep in Touch , Jean-Claude Rousseau's cinema returns to the city of Carl Andre and Hollis Frampton. It looks like a miniature remake of Rear Window , but a New York version. Rear Window flattened by a New York minimal artist. The window occupies almost the entire frame, the photographer is absent. The gaze, no longer voyeuristic, flutters across the surface of a red brick facade, on the other side, pierced by a myriad of equal openings. On the surface of the windows or in the depths of the rooms, life passes, disappears, returns, always inaccessible. Combining the greatest simplicity—a fixed and immutable frame—with the highest degree of sensitive and affective modulation, the author of De son appartement (Grand Prix FID 2007) here takes his art of variation to its peak. The variations of light convert the hours of the day into seasons of the year or of life. Objects appear and disappear on the windowsill, a piece of cardboard flaps in the wind, a phrase from a Fauré quintet returns like the refrain of an endless prayer. The triptych window, erected on its intensely black, shining sill, ends up appearing as what it is: an altar. An altar before which the man does not kneel but gestures, with a hand that trembles with fear and emotion, seized by the beating of absence and presence on either side of the window. Then he sits down, and it is his image that, when evening falls, is imprinted on the altarpiece—a receding reflection, a spectral self-portrait on the central pane. New York no longer exists. He barely does. Welcome is a ceremony of homage and farewell to a city and a bygone past. The paradoxical title formulates the enigma that is the film: Who is welcoming in this farewell? Where are we welcomed? What does this altar-window mark the threshold of? Beware, vertigo.

A structuralist diary, in blue and red.

In the blue hues of dawn, by a stationary merry-go-round, young people stagger home as workers in suits make their way to work. Radio Maputo Nakuzandza, 5:15 am: the first lights of day illuminate this magnificent opening shot. After immersing us in the daily life of the great city of Maputo, capital of Mozambique, the film comes to a close as night falls. Ariadine Zampaulo elegantly orchestrates an urban symphony whose findings never cease to surprise us, such as the radio program which runs as a common thread alongside a choreographed dérive. The words of residents and ambient sounds broadcast are interwoven unexpectedly into the sequences, to make the city heard in a film that is in constant, meandering movement. Figures meet then lose each other in the immense urban space: a jogger roams the main arteries of the city from morning to evening, a tourist with Keatonian gestures wanders around, a young fiancée having escaped from her wedding drifts like a ghost. In blending documentary- style shots, fictional scenes and dance performances in the ruins of abandoned buildings, Zampaulo composes a kaleidoscopic portrait of Maputo rather than following a single track. The urban landscape reveals the traces of its colonial past while the verses of the greatest Mozambican poets resound. In a sweeping yet precise gesture, Ariadine Zampaulo seeks to comprehend the city through its multiple branches, embracing History and the immediacy of the present. A film-poem with polyphonic prose, Maputo Nakuzandza ("Maputo I Love You") is nothing less than an ode to the city, and to life. (Louise Martin Papasian)

In an undefined location, between an empty office building and a disused shopping mall, a young man collapses to the ground in slow motion. The walls are moldering, mail piles up at the bottom of closed doors. Another young man observes through the windows the enigmatic ballet of two elegant young women who have taken over the urban desert as a playground for their subversive imaginations. Under the guise of reappropriating deserted offices and apartments, they engage in strange poetic-political actions, half-Situationist, half-Oulipo. Slipping pink, yellow, and green papers and tokens under office doors, sewing existential phrases onto clothing labels, etc. The minimal plot of Vía Negativa boils down to the boy's initiation into the rites and mysteries of the secret society, and the games of seduction it allows. The script and direction proceed by subtraction: from the drama, from the gravity, from any form of explanation of the situation. A strangely anxious, end-of-the-world atmosphere reigns in the deserted city, but the catastrophe has already occurred. A few signs hint at its nature: total and definitive decrepitude of the economy and society, like a collapsological extrapolation of the repeated crises striking Argentina. The singular beauty of this first film lies in the contrast between the picture of a world in the terminal stage of its collapse and the supreme elegance, the very haute couture care with which Alan Martín Segal crafts his shots, works the frames, the lights, and the sounds. But make no mistake: beneath their chic and playful appearance, the negative path taken by the film and its characters is of the highest political consequence. Letting the world go to its ruin in order to regain life. Making nothing, then giving form to nothing. To undo the world, to empty it, and to make one's life a form in movement in free space. Let elegance be the ultimate resistance.

In the summer promiscuity of a seaside campsite, a trio of teenage girls spies on a depressed seasonal worker who disguises himself as a bear to be the campsite mascot. Their imaginations, stimulated by the chilling story of a child abduction that occurred a few decades earlier, lead them to believe that something fishy is going on around the man. Between documentary exploration, coming-of-age story, thriller, and fairy tale, Lluís Galter blends narrative registers in the summer torpor to construct a singular, seductive, and unsettling object. Spying through the window, ears glued to the doors, insistence on empty spaces: sometimes voyeuristic, sometimes detective, the camera's eye casts doubt on the seemingly innocent motifs of a holiday imagery of campsites dominated by the specter of child disappearances. End-of-day showers, beach sessions, card games… Doubling the disturbing strangeness of this succession of motifs, the epidermal style of DV Pal delights in contact with tanned bodies, merges bare legs and tall grass, drowns in its pixels the nocturnal silhouette of a lost child. To the ear, the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun enchants everything, until the overexcited cries coming from the campsite pool abruptly interrupt it. The marshy surroundings invite nighttime outings transformed into explorations of a hostile jungle. The cry of an American bittern becomes the disturbing lament of ghosts buried in the sand, where the missing boy will eventually be found. The synesthetic and fragmented plot of Aftersun is that of a child's dream after a long day of vacation, where discoveries about the sexual lives of adults are intertwined with the naivety of games and chronicles of news items with local legends. It is an organic and strange drift where stories overlap, where teenage girls with overflowing imaginations get rid of their childhood by playing at scaring each other.

In Príncipe de Paz (FID 2019), young Mexicans wander between nature and the city, confronted with the enigma of a giant skeleton. Atados los años engullen la terra takes up these motifs and concentrates them in two figures: a young man and a young woman, born from a volcano whose eruption, in the majestic foreground, is announced by the chromatic disturbance of the image. He wanders in the jungle and opens himself to the perception of the senses. She confronts the devastation of the natural world by man, before opening herself to society and compassion. A dialectic of the immense and the intimate, the natural and the social, the everyday and the time of myth: between cosmic enigma and visual splendor, Clemente Castor's cinema advances by leaps and bounds.

Franz Kafka's famous short story about a man's transformation into an insect, filmed as a surreal version of a children's TV show by Israeli artist and iconoclast Roee Rosen.

Philippines, 1974: As Marcos entrenches his oppressive regime ever more firmly following the imposition of martial law in 1972, Servando Monzon III, heir to the hacienda and family businesses of his powerful clan, refuses to capitulate to the dictator's plans to control the country. Lav Diaz, a tireless and incisive probe of the shadowy areas of Philippine history, offers here, with this adaptation of the short story and screenplay by Ricardo Lee Servando Magdamag, a film with epic scope. The ambition, as the title unequivocally indicates, is nothing less than to scrutinize Philippine violence, to explore its roots, from Spanish colonization to the present day. Feudalism and power relations are thus scrutinized. Carried by a powerful cast—John Lloyd Cruz, in the lead role, is a huge television and film celebrity in the Philippines—this "sine novela," to use the words written at the beginning, blends the codes of the telenovela with the cinema of Lav Diaz, which at first glance seems quite distant. The story unfolds over time the mutual relationships of a profusion of characters, filmed in a sumptuous black and white that is now the subject of most of his films. The filmmaker himself frames these magnificent, stretching shots, sensory experiences of tableaux vivants attentive to the bodies inscribed in a place as well as to the languages ​​used, to the inner movements and the dead times. In this film, both a tragic fresco set in the past and a tale of an "endless nightmare," Lav Diaz assumes a dual dimension that is allegorical—figures of the philosopher or the blind—and informative, like the revolutionary instruction meetings that punctuate the story. This "tale of violence" is also a long-winded film with very contemporary resonances, as recalled by the very recent election to the presidency of another Marcos, devoted son of the previous one.

Due to long-term observation of the NPCs (Non-Playable Characters) the player witnesses certain documentary events that take place in different parts of the in-game world. However, these events are permeated by common cross-cutting themes: excessive cruelty and human indifference. To some extent the constant movement (which also accompanies the player-observer throughout the in-game space) is the only salvation from arbitrariness on the streets but not always.

Two men, Tera and Jin, live deep in the countryside of Japan, in a house built of sustainable materials—an autonomous structure that doesn't rely on non-renewable energy. Tera is a local, used to living in the wild. Jin is an intellectual who moved from the city and struggles to keep up. Cerebrally, Jin knows that this is the lifestyle he wants but can he live it? Perhaps none of it matters in nature, in poetry and in the rain. A meditation on our present and future shot on 16mm b&w film.

Saleh Kashefi, a young Iranian filmmaker, composes a poetic logbook with fragments of his Parisian life. Grace of youthful faces captured with tenderness, golden glow of religious paintings, prosaic details of a thready daily life where a dull sadness lies… Each shot is a note whose vibrancy is increased by a sound material, a ghostly double, made of thick silences and repeated motifs, melodic apparitions and echoes. Development is the cinematic translation of a vague feeling of melancholy that pours out sensitively from the bottom of a bathtub.

What do the wild waves say? In the wake of Saturn and Beyond (Georges de Beauregard International Prize, FID 2021), Declan Clarke is listening again. The waves, here, are those which, through the writer Francis Stuart, connected the Irish nationalist movement to Nazi Germany in the heart of the 20th century: anti-English chronicles for German radio from 1940 to 1944, a pirate transmitter transported to Ireland, infiltration of agents with his wife who remained in the country... The filmmaker puts himself in the role of the writer but never lets us hear his voice, as if to distance himself from the power of the radio broadcast as a vector of discourse. Rigorous and playful, both lively and melancholic, this film is a meditation on political compromises and the mass media that are their tools.

One day, Jean-Christian Riff noticed two boys playing a mysterious game below his window. He took out his camera. This was the beginning of a film that, without the camera ever leaving its unique position behind the window, gradually expanded the sphere of perception and emotion to the dimensions of the world. Space made this cosmological miracle possible: a bus stop, a quayside bordering a river, but also the filmmaker's apartment where the intimate daily life rustles: a multiple scene where time, seasons, and beings of all ages and conditions pass by. This film is the last by its author, who died just after finishing editing. It is life itself, converted into poetry.

What is political rhetoric? How is a word embodied? How is listening established? So many questions at the heart of so-called politics. And just as decisive, who speaks to whom? For Pauline Bastard, whose projects (films or performances) consist of infiltrating reality and creating fictions that take it to its foundations, the 2022 presidential campaign offered the perfect opportunity. Here follow one another the bodies of some—you, me, everyone, in short, the ultimate political body in a democracy—who endorse, take on the game, and sometimes the words of what has already been said by others, well-known candidates. From one speech to the next, through the deviations this allows as much as through the unexpected conjunctions, the exposure is as enjoyable as it is disconcerting

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

Sweeping strokes: first the woman, who then hands it to the man standing beside her; he takes another sweep, then hands it to her again. In a voiceover, a woman reads a letter detailing her efforts to get her daughter enrolled in daycare; a man contesting a fine will follow, then other Kafkaesque situations collectively and humorously painting a portrait of the dysfunctions of everyday life. In the image, the choreography of the birds on the beach echoes the wanderings of the two characters on the beaches of the Camargue. Above all, the man and woman reenact paintings by Manet and Titian, complicitly exchanging places and, by the same token, their nudity and the gaze that clings to them.

From cabaret to lip-syncing, a highly playful game involves making someone else's voice your own. Ventriloquized by a series of media voices that the viewer can have fun recognizing, the actor from Il faut se trompe glides from room to room and from character to character during a Sunday stroll through his apartment. Beyond the blurring of identities, Valentin Dilas's masterful performance, skillfully directed by Jean Boiron Lajous, speaks to us about how we incorporate the discourses of others and how their inner paths structure our attitudes, even our gait.

After a feature film dedicated to her mute autistic daughter ( Pénélope mon amour , FID 2021), Claire Doyon seeks answers to some of her questions from an autistic friend with Asperger's syndrome. The friend sits facing the camera, in a large garden where birds are singing. The words exchanged on both sides of the camera quickly go beyond the framework of the interview. Because as much or more than a word, it is a presence that must be welcomed. Combining the digital material of the interview with silent shots of Super 8 flowers, Claire Doyon not only achieves the most tender and playful of portraits. Her brief and lively film manages to touch, as rarely before, on the enigma of autism as a way of being in the world, and on the poetry that is specific to it.

Bringing back to life the traces yellowed by time of an existence carefully stored in the archives. Giving body to one of the most beautiful Polish poetic voices of the 20th century. Building in the most rigorous and mastered documentary tradition a memorial and a vibrant homage. These are the promises kept by All of Me Will Not Disappear . Zuzanna Ginczanka was shot, at the age of 27, in 1944, at the dawn of growing recognition in Polish literary circles. Joanna Grudzinska takes this tragic death as a starting point to place on maps of Poland today the story of an existence whose dazzling trajectory takes us back to Nazi barbarity, then to the intellectual effusion of the 1930s, the chronicle of a war foretold – there's too much coming: either love or war – and finally to the rebellious adolescent, attentive to the first stirrings of a woman's body. Joanna Grudzinska's beautiful operational gesture is to reverse the course of things. She proceeds to a journey back in time, from death to life, guided by the enlightened gaze of researchers and specialists. The moving and scientific interviews are matched by the tight framing of the light writing of personal diaries, the aged calligraphy of vintage press clippings. The breath of her poetry contaminates the documentary material, infiltrates the gardens of Lviv, the streets of Warsaw, and mingles with the rustling of nature. All of Me Will Not Disappear is a film inhabited by the rebellious and sensual words of "The Star of Zion," whose vitality and modernity are loudly proclaimed. Young teenage girls here and there recite the poems aloud; women chant their rights in demonstrations. An ode to freedom through a vitalist and feminist work, All of Me Will Not Disappear, whose title refers to the 1942 poem nicknamed Non omnis moriar, looks at contemporary Poland which, far from welcoming the gesture, has chosen to censor it.

Under the unfinished arch of a disused building, Amira Louadah has gathered a group of athletes connected by the use of their fists, calling themselves "the 300 faction," after Zac Snyder's virile blockbuster. The slender architecture of the bare concrete pillars, planted in the middle of the desert, gives the place a kind of sacredness, halfway between Richard Serra's monoliths and the dolmens of Stonehenge. The triviality of the boxing gloves and dirty T-shirts captured in close-ups, however, competes with the Hollywood and mythological solemnity of the mineral landscape, opening onto a city in the distance. We learn nothing about these men except that they form a team and that they share the task of training their bodies. Here we salute Amira Louadah's skill in using cinema to subvert a prosaic space (a gym) and reconfigure it, with great economy of means, as a final refuge. L'Arche offers an operation of transposition: their performed boxer bodies become warrior bodies in the heart of the story. Indeed, in a few elements (music, shot values, voiceover), the director transforms reality and constructs a dystopian speculative fiction as brief as it is effective. Fateh, the coach, trains his men for a final battle to come against a faceless enemy. Today's Algeria becomes the scene of a nightmarish world of tomorrow, described in two boxes, sketched in a few shots filmed on a cell phone. L'Arche concentrates in the hardness of the stones and the dust of the landscape all the dramaturgy of the great stories of ecological and political collapse. The Algerian national flag, raised in a final movement, carried by the lyricism of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, floats in the ambiguity of a symbol that can signify both unity and division, the end of a time and a new beginning.

The sea has a taste of ancestors. At its own rythm, a weaving is being made in water and on its historicity. Perception and imagination are the same. How does our mental space influences and shape the way our bodies are perceiving and moving ? Thinking from the context of Guadeloupe, a caribbean archipelago under french assimilation, a stream of thoughts on land, water and human relations to the land are projected on an old school blackboard and mixed with gestures to prepare a calebasse, a traditional container.

We find with pleasure in Spilliaert the taste for weaving and mixing genres that delighted us in NP (FID 2020). Lisa Spilliaert uses the pretext of an investigation into her possible common roots with Léon Spilliaert, the great master of Belgian symbolism, to interweave in a lively and brief film a portrait of the painter, a sensitive approach to his work and a playful reflection on the notions of heritage and lineage, all punctuated by rap pieces of her own. If rap has been a space for asserting identity since its birth, Lisa Spilliaert seizes it literally and joyfully. The first shot of the film depicts her vigorously, bust-length, surrounded by works, paintings and sculptures, her determined gaze fixed on the camera: she raps. Her words, which strike the air like self-affirmations, are tied to the paintings of the man who shares the same initials and surname with her, while the camera lingers on the motifs dear to the painter. The director interweaves traditional biographical interviews, documentary material—archives and documents produced as part of her genealogical research—and a sensual and detailed approach, through close-ups, of Léon Spilliaert's work as well as his own sister's oblong sculptures. As a counterpoint to the visual marriage of the two pictorial and sculptural materials, a descendant of the painter comments in voiceover on his intimate relationship with his ancestor's work. Genealogists announce their verdict: if the criterion used is genealogical trees, Lisa and Léon are not from the same family. But the heart of the film affirms it: a common core exists, which unites the painter and the filmmaker like two branches stretched out in the same impulse towards art.

Filmed on the streets of Saigon, where the unplanned disappearance of the human subject disrupts the flow of linear time and grants the filmmakers access to that which was previously imperceivable.

Continuing his research into the canons of European art, their concepts, their history and their grey areas ( Daphne and Thomas , FID 2019), Assaf Gruber leads the tour. Rude Witness – (d')après Transient Witness – takes us from a van loaded with works, which we learn were stolen from the famous Grünes Gewölbe (" the Green Vault ") museum belonging to the Dresden State Collections (SKD), to this same museum, considered here as a domestic space: the line is clear. In this film cultivating a deadpan sense of humor, borrowing from the codes of detective cinema, we follow a very strange thief flanked by his imposing dog, transformed from museum visitor into master of his territory. Playing on the mocking gaze of the oriental-inspired caryatids as a welcome to the building, Assaf Gruber multiplies the slippages to redistribute gestures that Art History sometimes struggles to distinguish: collecting and stealing. The shifts question the concepts of inheritance, attribution, law, and loss that shape the dominant narratives of Art History, with looting off-screen. The repressed returns in this story of boxing (in a display case). The museum's objects and spaces, stripped of the conventional museum distinction between seeing and doing, are playfully reactivated. Moving from one thief to another, from the dead to the living, right up to the dog aptly named Präsens (the present in German), the film unfolds a story of nested devourings, like this Chad Gadya , a cumulative counting rhyme sung in Italian where everyone, from the mouse to the cat, from the cat to the dog... ends up being beaten in the next verse.

In Kyiv, the war still seems inconceivable, but the pandemic forces a mother and her daughter to spend the lockdown in their shared apartment. The mother is a piano teacher who keeps giving lessons on the phone, on her kitchen table, with the same passion and perfectionism. Her daughter has an art studio at the other end of the apartment, yet she has swapped her paintbrushes for a camera. Ptitsa: a bird, in Russian, like those who brave winter on snow-covered windowsills. In her first film, Ukrainian painter Alina Maksimenko uses the duo she makes with her mother as a model to compose a double portrait inside their unclosed environment, devoid of any form of narcissism, which turns into a poignant meditation on loss and finitude. The story switches between two conversations. That of Alina and her mother, both preoccupied by their coming separation, since the daughter has decided to move out. And the conversation Alina has on the phone with her friend Inna, whose daughter Katya has just been killed in a car accident. How do you face loss? How do you stand it when life comes to an end? How do you keep it together when everything is falling apart? No lecture is to be given here, but Alina Maksimenko demonstrates, through the very beauty and decency of her film, that there might be some continuity, some renewal beyond the void. Through talking, first, when words are carefully chosen and spoken from the heart, as it is miraculously the case in each and every moment of Ptitsa. Through art as well, through the careful and meticulous shaping of forms that resist the chaos outside. The director makes her film, composes her frames as the painter does her paintings: alone, patiently arranging transparencies and opacities between the walls and windows of the apartment, welcoming depth at the surface of images. (Cyril Neyrat)

Liv Schulman enjoys working with figures who become alter egos of sorts. After the investigator in her metaphysical detective series Control, she introduces us to a new avatar. The point here is to reach a certain level of exposure.

From the outset, Simón Velez's film establishes dramatic tension: after a sudden crescendo, the grainy sounds of nervous electro noise collapse into a bucolic scene of archery between two men, giving way to the texture of film. Sofí, in her twenties, visits a fortune teller. She doesn't promise her anything good—bad moods, indecision, problems—and the mysterious secular accessories the young woman surrounds herself with, such as these colored nightlights and other gadget lamps, won't be enough to counter the prevailing gloom. Signs seem to confirm the bad omens: a fire she films from the Medellín elevated metro, a failed casting in the face of a phlegmatic director. Eschewing any excess of intrigue, the film follows its character's wanderings and advances through ruptures. Thus, this documentary sally, filmed at the flea market, shows Sofí, idle, strolling in the thickness of reality, among the stalls or standing in front of cathode-ray screens, which refer as much to a bygone era as to a fantasy world. In the middle of the film, the notes of Lucio Battisti and the sound of a backfiring motorcycle engine interrupt her idleness, and begin a journey: Sofí clings to Gina's waist, and leaves the city to reach lush nature and virgin waters in which to bathe. A little love is finally imprinted on the expired film. If time seems to stop in this Edenic landscape at the edge of the world, the enchanted interlude suddenly gives way to an accidental drama, whose cruel and unexpected emergence is emphasized by the return of the stinging noise from the beginning. As in his previous films, Simón Vélez handles the tension between deadly tragedy and unashamed sensuality with grace and skill. Once again, the beauty of Los mayores ríos se deslizan bajo tierra lies in exploring this ridge between life and death .

A scientist in yellow overalls is taking samples of green algae on a beach in Brittany. Lifting his mask, he suddenly drops down dead. There's panic in the village – he's not the first person to disappear, and the municipality suspects that toxic algae are the cause. Nevertheless, it's out of the question to endanger the tourism industry or accuse intensive farming for this maleficent bloom. The mayor prefers to suspect the Parisian "bobos" who rent the Airbnb on the beach. But all it takes is one high tide for the dead to re-emerge from the seaweed carpet as zombies. From then on, of course, everything goes downhill. A hedonistic parody of Romero's gory, political zombie movies, EVIL SEAWEED takes satire and schoolboy adventure to the limit. No-one can escape the zombie violence, but neither can anything stand up to the non-conformist, anarchistic firepower of the author of LA FILLE DU 14 JULLET and YELLOW SATURDAY (FID 2021): neither local politics and its spinelessness, nor the ready-made ideas of Parisian thirty-somethings. Among them, Muppet stands out. The amateur laboratory technician discovers she has a superpower, a lethal weapon in her chest. Flashing zombies! A madcap idea from Antonin Peretjatko, the author and director of this jubilant Breton farce, who seems to have followed no other principle than his own pleasure. And ours –pure pleasure, provided we're willing to play the (killing) game. (Cyril Neyrat)

The film opens with a well-known British nursery rhyme: Boys and girls come out to play . It ends with a call, whispered in the ear at bedtime, to go out and play and see what's going on in the street. This is precisely what Ben Rivers and Céline Condorelli propose with After Work , the latter having been commissioned to create a playground in a working-class neighborhood in South London. From one off-screen scene to the next, from the game to its construction, the aim is to take a closer look at what these playgrounds tell us: about childhood, about the street, about living together. To carry out this investigation, as political as it is sensory, nourished by the plastic beauty and sensuality of Rivers' 16mm images, they are accompanied by Jay Bernard, poet, artist, figure of the literary and LGBT world of London. In the image, we discover the implementation of the object – digging the earth, preparing the ground, welding, polishing. It is suggested by touches, captured by a camera playing with colors and superimpositions, attentive to snatches of work gestures – a whole process diffracted with a mishandled chronology. At the same time, Jay Bernard's voice chants his beautiful poem, rough, elliptical, which draws us at its own pace into a world of words nourished by experiences at the surface of our being. Unfolding from this condensed corner of the city, an urban world populated by workers at work and a bestiary composed of cats but also a fleeting fox. An unexpected guest in the city, he seems surprised by the construction site and by the introduction of children's play into his world. The film, by its very constitution, is an operator of encounters, sometimes discordant: between worlds, between the poem and the images, between work and play, the city and the animals, between the adult world and that of children – which Rivers, wisely taking a gamble, does not film.

A 2022 French language documentary directed by Mathieu Amalric. The film screened at FIDMarseille in 2022.

In her film entitled Rough Red, Amanda Devulsky endeavours to tell History differently, to show the reverse angle of political action, as well as to postulate that another form of resistance is possible. By shedding light on the lived experience of those who are unseen in public space, she has authored a historiography of the hidden. We're following the lives of Jô, Eunice, Alessa and Fabiana, four women who were still teenagers when they became mothers, at a time when Brazil itself was becoming a democracy, during the 1985-1995 decade, in Brasilia. Four women experiencing the strains of motherhood, and whose struggles were not played out in public but rather in the private space of the home. Blending personal archives with images shot in 2018, during the campaign leading up to Jair Bolsonaro's election, Amanda Devulsky constructs a monumental narrative.

Passe-parole anchors its story to a news story, which quickly reveals itself as a pretext for creating a sensitive and carnal portrait of a generation centered around two main characters, Pierre and Mila, and a well-established group of thirty-somethings. They are journalists, teachers, carpenters, artists, living between Paris, Marseille, and Brussels. Mario Valero stages fragments of daily life and interweaves them with urban and bucolic impressionistic bursts. The noise of the world in the background—street rumors, visual echoes of demonstrations, snippets of news, presidential speeches—marks the passing of time. We're not sure if separating is a good decision. We're not sure where to live. " Why do we walk on eggshells as soon as we talk about politics ?" A shot lingers at the opening on a computer screen where it searches for the right word, just as the agile camera seems to search for the right distance between zooming in and out. Emotional ups and downs follow one another without narrative salience. A sharp montage abruptly interrupts the parties as well as the characters' intimate conversations: Passe-parole strives to let nothing unfold or take root in scenes framed on the bodies. This fragmentation distils a dull uncertainty and translates a floating and confused world. Nourished by the New Wave, by brilliantly mastering the codes and motifs, Passe-parole nevertheless remains a proudly enigmatic film, which produces no discourse to explain itself. It draws an emotional landscape in autumnal colors, a symptom of a withering and a sadness dug out by very beautiful polyphonic songs with nostalgic accents. What then remains and resists are the faces, friends, loved ones, gathered by Mario Valero in close-up and caressing shots, like a bouquet of flowers that we know will wilt.

X14, a giant robot, manga-like, punk-leaning, opera-loving, voyeur, lives with Liz, a sad and sexy 28-year-old girl who has an artificial heart. On borrowed time. One day, a happy goofy young man appears who will disturb their automatic daily life.

Within a dramatic fiction that maintains a subtle balance between social realism and theatrical stylization, Emily Barbelin depicts, for her first film, the lives of a group of young sex workers in a world governed by the desires of the men who punctuate their nights. We rarely see these men, fleeting figures, either asleep or caught in pure fits of violence. A woman's voiceover addresses a distant mother, a winter landscape scrolls by the window of a train and welcomes the expressions that describe them. To be loved by whom, freed from a plot, ascends to a liberating climax in a non-linear montage that proceeds in bursts (of laughter, violence, tenderness). Why do they do this job? A thousand reasons that one can surmise. The film does not seek to explain them. The director chooses to portray their shared intimacy in the sidelines of their profession: communal baths, drunken nights and escapes between women, discussions in hoodies around a table, waiting for customers in the darkness of the hostess bar... When she focuses on the tired looks and faces, she succeeds in making a film inhabited by their choreographed bodies, neither sensual nor erotic. The three young women are so alike that it's hard to tell. They are not sisters but form a common body. "One for all, all for one," Emily Barbelin seems to be telling us. It is in this gap between the cheapness of the costume and the artificiality of the shady spaces, reminiscent of Fassbinder, and the skin-deep sensitivity of their exchanges that the portrait of To Be Loved By Whom lies: them, "the straw girls," universal, caught between their desire for poetry and the crass triviality to which men reduce them.

"You're between 15 and 22 years old, you want to sing in a musical, sign up at ozu.com." A young man shouts this announcement through a megaphone, and the stars pour into the city streets. About fifteen young people, mostly girls, a few boys, pass the casting. They stop in front of Jacques Meilleurat's camera for a song, sung a cappella or accompanied by a guitar or ukulele. Étoiles is the continuation of their performances, crudely captured in the summer light. It's simple and it's moving, through the sheer gift of these faces and voices venturing nakedly into the pure present of song. But since the author of Leaning on the Wall (Grand Prix de la Compétition Française, FID 2021) is anything but naive, the film is far from being so simple or innocent. Sometimes a synthetic accompaniment comes out of nowhere to add to the live sound. Then the casting film becomes the beginning of the musical to come. And as in any musical, the lyrics of the songs speak of and for those who sing them. As they often exchange a few secrets with the young man in the cast, each sequence becomes a portrait, and the film that of a generation, of a youth, popular and mixed, in a city in the Southwest. Today's youth also sings songs of yesterday: in this gap also emerges the self-portrait of a tormented filmmaker, in love with the people he films but revolted against his time. A darkness intermittently veils the brilliance of the performances: intimate or family pain, lives promised to precariousness, the shadow cast by Covid on the existence – of the people and the film. By having Les Mots Bleus sung and heard four times, there is no doubt that Meilleurat is paying homage to its author, Christophe, who died during the editing process, and dedicating Étoiles .

Enjoy the Weather began as a choreographic research project led by Portuguese choreographer and dancer Teresa Silva during a residency in Marseille (Montevideo). Today, it is an exemplary film of the most unique things that can be achieved by combining the arts of image and the moving body. The starting point is a reading of Emanuele Coccia's The Life of Plants. In it, the philosopher adopts the perspective of plants to imagine a new understanding of the world as a living system connecting all beings, animate and inanimate. This hypothesis is embodied in a succession of tableaux in which four dancers lend their gestures to new relationships with image and sound. A common thread weaves a web between bodies with a floating embodiment, in a courtyard traversed by gusts of wind. Four voices, off-camera but situated, take turns reading a strange ecological tale, whose narrative unfolds a farandole of non-human beings interacting with the seasons and the variations in the weather. In the image, two men and two women pace the space, their arms caught in a hypnotic movement that seems to unwind and rewind the invisible thread of the story. In the following painting, hands coordinate their gestures to revive a still life. Fluctuations in superimpositions, variations in shadow or color filters: infinite plastic variations affect the bodies and disturb their relationship to space. "School could be everything. Everything could be school": thus began the tale. What is offered here to our astonished senses is nothing less than the dream or utopia of a universal pedagogy.

We know Gaël Lépingle's taste for the provinces and its medium-sized towns. A precise, insistent taste, often generous to its inhabitants in search of adventure, from one film to the next, from Julien (FID 2010) to Seuls les pirates (FID 2018). The provinces are observed here through the prism of the trajectories of boys who like boys, which Gaël Lépingle traces in three stories in as many places, three moments of life and choices. For each, he sketches with fine touches the ways of living homosexuality where it is possible, or sometimes unimaginable; far from drama, while clichés on the subject abound. In the opening, a young man seems to dream of something other than the business he is about to take over and the married life that goes with it, attracted by the life he imagines to be piquant for a queer vaudeville troupe touring his village; follows the wanderings of a teenager, the improbable experience of his slender silhouette in the streets of his village; finally, it is the fetishistic passion of an honorable teacher sent back to his renunciations. Painting these three pictures that end up becoming a fresco, Gaël Lépingle becomes a cartographer of the spaces of desire, in landscapes without quality or roughness, if not their desolate flatness and the lives it announces. So many trajectories, so many decisions to make for these provincial boys. Lépingle delicately draws its dead ends or openings, lingers on the in-between: between words and bodies, between desire and dull life, between bodies and landscapes, in search of the right distance between beings. With cross-dressing and its possibilities like a secret formula that would connect them.

A famous landing: Algiers La Blanche under a radiant light. The picture darkens with the reading, off-camera, of the text of surrender of the Dey of Algiers in 1830. On the Conquest confronts us with a page turned too quickly in the French national novel. With audacity, Franssou Prenant brings together a community of complicit voices who read in a neutral tone a succession of archives (reports, testimonies, memoirs, historical, geographical, urban planning considerations, etc.). They relate the stages of the colonization of Algeria by France between 1830 and 1848 and draw the ideological landscape of a staggering enterprise of annihilation. The film could have been titled On Destruction . The director thus constructs a memorial by means of an operation common to History and cinema: editing. A montage of texts: the words of Victor Hugo, Ernest Renan, and Tocqueville mingle with those of soldiers, high-ranking officials, and brigadiers, making it impossible to distinguish the perpetrators. A montage of images then echoes the atrocities and spoliations of the past in the present: in counterpoint to a tale of murder, the film presents the desolate landscape of a desert or the frank and innocent smiles of adolescents. The promises of wealth offered by colonized Algeria are echoed by shots of an opulent, Haussmann-style Parisian heart. We are plunged into a reflexive movement on the nature of this extraordinary violence, supported by an imaginative drift into contemporary Algeria, tied to the archives heard through games of divergences and rapprochements. The accumulation of texts reveals both the ethnocentric and racist imagination and the cold logic of economic exploitation that presided over the colonization of Algeria and their irreversible consequences, which Algerian society still suffers today.

In a few shots, Denis Cointe introduces us to a lush garden plunged into a thick silence, quickly broken by sustained notes mixed with birdsong. Like inner music, these sounds accompany a long static shot that exposes a woman in a wheelchair, her hand wrapped in a cloth. When a car speeds by in the background, the sound of the engine reconfigures what we hear into direct sound. We then return to the first images that established the setting and the presence of speakers scattered throughout the green microcosm. They constitute listening points for sound pieces created by contemporary composers (Alessandro Bossetti, Felix Blum, etc.). Barail advances in static shots to the heart of this garden, discovering one by one its severely disabled occupants in a listening situation. The frontality and the duration of the shots transform the image into a mirror, organizing a "hand-to-hand combat" with us, the spectators, bringing us back to the extreme fragility of these residents. The deafening roar of an airplane once again shatters the tranquility of this sound and visual landscape. It signals the brutality of the outside world and, in counterpoint, underscores the delicacy of this protected place, where the occupants live in harmony with nature and flourish among the flowers. Caught up in the movements of these soundscapes—in one of them, for example, the tinkling of bells suggests the proximity of a herd of goats in the garden—we watch their faces for the slightest sign of pleasure, contentment, or preference. Thus, more than contemplating, Barail invites us to share a listening experience with them, to experience it, establishing our gaze by shaping our ear, calling from us what the garden and its residents require: attention. A photo album immerses us in childhood memories. Barail, the name of this Garden of Eden, is the ideal refuge for vulnerable and languageless existences, from plants to the children we all once were.

February 24, 2022, Russian troops descend on Ukraine. Once the shock has passed, how can we respond? For Marine Hugonnier, it will be a matter of using her means—cinema, images—driven, as she specifies in the introduction, by "a desire to present a common front and a common image." This is the announced program. With a twofold gesture, first going to the Polish border, then once there, filming. Then transporting supplies to Kyiv. Thus, in the opening, recorded in grainy 16mm black and white, a familiar but dual universe unfolds before our eyes: an ordinary train station, but a station that also summons all the emblematic images of exoduses with which European history is sadly rich. A night interior, pale light, camera planted in the heart of a crowded corridor. A busy crowd—women and children mostly—gestures, hubbub that resonates like a common voice. The film unfolds from this central point, from encounter to encounter, in multiple narratives, carried by refugees or by those who came to help. It finds its strength in shots of faces composed like so many portraits. Faces and their stories; the decision to separate them allows for a double movement, of listening and attention. Presences appear suspended, between the power of speech and the stubborn presence of bodies to be there, like this female doctor determined to return to Ukraine to heal, or this young man who came to fight. Creating a common image would then consist of impressing the film with a camera like a "body projected into the present." With images which, although filmed in March 2022, already seem to us, a disturbing paradox, to bear History. That of a moment in suspense, of war as a threat just actualized rather than as a reality crushing bodies and landscapes.

Two young men live, each on their own, in a liminal space: either in a situation of threshold or permanent transition between two worlds. One of these worlds, filmed with a camera, seems more "real" than the other, represented by computer-generated images (CGI) and explored by a digital avatar. But nothing is less certain. For what the film seeks to think about, represent, and recount is this other reality constituted by living on the threshold between the two worlds. To experience this reality of the threshold, the directors imagined the correspondence between the two explorers, each recording and sending to the other their travel stories in the altered reality. The situations alternate between recording and listening, voice-in and voice-over. The film thus produces this reality, and the floating mode of being that goes with it, by constantly folding the worlds onto each other in the audiovisual image, and each time differently. But whether they speak or listen, a common absence seems to affect the travelers, as if the mind had separated from the body. This separation grants a strange freedom: that of giving oneself a new body, new powers of perception and action—of being one's own Prometheus. At the risk of floating, of marking time in the suspense of time, on the threshold of existence, of incarnation itself. This is perhaps what is signified by the punctuation, throughout the story, of a third mode of perception: that of surveillance videos that film everything and nothing continuously, like the one that, pointed at Maidan Square on February 24, as it does every day, recorded for nothing the sound of the first Russian explosions around Kyiv. In this film, both simple and enigmatic, opaque and luminous, Gaetano Liberti and Luciano Pérez Savoy summon a power of cinema too rarely employed: that of manifesting, in order to study it, a singular or new, but strangely disturbing, way of being in the world.

A mysterious manuscript found by chance, twins, two countries, books passing from hand to hand... So many ingredients that Leonardo Mouramateus distributes as one would with cards. Comings and goings, bifurcations, a play of false mirrors between the characters, the filmmaker finds an obvious pleasure in losing us and playing with echoes, as with the actors who reappear under other figures. In five chapters, each devoted to a figure, like in a tarot card - the castle, the cheat, the hallucinated one, etc. - the film takes us from Rio de Janeiro to Lisbon. The threads cross, stretch, twist or wrap. A blurring is orchestrated mezzo voce , between mise en abyme and discreet enigmas distilled throughout the film: micro-shifts, secret correspondences, discreet lineaments. Thus, the most imperceptible daily life and its routine can generate the strangest situations, with playful resonances, the story having fun with causes and effects. Events would be like the elements of a great game, but all lightness. This evocation of astrology seems to suggest, to be understood as a metaphor for events and what can determine their sequence. This merry-go-round of palimpsests and correspondences testifies to a pleasure in invention, redoubled in Leonardo Mouramateus by an obvious joy in creating images with a great economy of means. Rigor of shots, humor of frames, play of colors: this film joyfully reminds us that cinema allows us to create a world of signs that we could simply take as so many beginnings of possible stories. A praise of arrangement above all else? This is what these flowers arranged in delicate bouquets that dot the film seem to suggest.

Consider three locations. 1. A workshop located in Germany where we follow the making of a prosthetic hand. 2. A traditional glove-making workshop in Millau, in the south of France. 3. A jeans factory in Istanbul, a large-scale industrial production. Three workspaces that follow one another, but a common method and object: the relationships between hand and machine, work and material, observed with patience and rigor. Relationships and gestures that Daniel Eisenberg strives to scrutinize meticulously, attentive to each action that this involves and the time required for each operation, from the beginning to the finished forms. Eisenberg continues here the project initiated in his previous installment, The Unstable Object (FID 2011), where he compared, already through triangulation, work in a high-tech automobile factory in Dresden, then in an outdated watch repair workshop in Chicago, and finally in a cymbal factory in Istanbul. Here, space is given to hands, to the body, to the image, from one place of production to another: reconstituted bodies, modeled bodies, dressed bodies. To the social body too, whether collective bodies at work or their images shaped by the objects whose manufacture we follow. The patience of an attentive camera and the fascinating rhythm of this choreography allow the gestures to unfold. The geography of production modes also engages the history it underlies, such as that of the globalization of trade. And, crucial here, the time of the production of the objects themselves seems to respond to that of the spectator facing the unfolding of the film, like an echo between absorbed gazes, theirs as well as ours. A beautiful work of the gaze and of thought in action on work, a very unstable object.

Young Ukrainians, among friends, day and night. Metal piercings, Proust-esque questionnaires, alcohol, the circulation of desire. The poverty of the image indicates amateur DV, the cell phones are Nokia 3310s: the rushes date from 2005-2007, the director's youth. The political situation of a divided nation is evoked in dotted lines: the number of Russian-speaking Ukrainians, the electoral success of the pro-Russian Party of Regions. Showcasing these vestiges of an intimate past today, the filmmaker rereads them through the prism not only of the conflict with Russia, but also of the changes in sociability and the relationship to images. These are sometimes slowed to the point of stasis, frozen in frames: the making of a memory

In a context with few possibilities of mobility, Diego and his mother are faced with the need to share time and space. Household chores and interviews accompany their routine, suddenly, a malfunctioning boiler interrupts life. Diego's girlfriend's birthday is coming up and with it several decisions to make.

"The Life of Infamous Men" was the project for a book that never saw the light of day but for which Michel Foucault wrote a preface. He wanted to collect the written traces of peculiar lives whose uniqueness was considered scandalous and led to denunciations and legal condemnations. "All these lives that were destined to pass by unnoticed and disappear without ever having been described were only able to leave traces – brief, incisive, and often enigmatic – when they had fleeting contact with the authorities. It is therefore probably impossible ever to recapture them in themselves, as they might have been 'in the wild'". It's this "in the wild" state of a life summarised in a few lines in an internment register from 1707 that Marianne Pistone and Gilles Deroo's film seeks to reconstruct. As pared-down and luminous as Mouton, their previous feature, The Life of Infamous Men brings out from the pithy portrait cited in its opening a gallery of genre scenes, arranging them in a patchy narrative that replays the fragmentary layers of these lives. In doing so, it liberates Mathurin's story from the "declamations, [the] tactical bias, [the] peremptory lies that the authorities' games and the relationships with it involve". Here, the authorities' representatives make up a truculent court of jesters with illiterate scribes, egotistical judges and plodding policemen bundled up in their uniforms. And as for Mathurin Milan, his life is interwoven with tiny moments whose delicacy becomes clearer as he moves away from the world of men – the dinners where bread is shared whilst contemplating a beetle or a tulip in the undergrowth, his hermit's journey resembling a sensuous quest, achieved by the film's particular attention to the gestures of kneading dough, to the rustlings of nature, the breathing of beasts, and the pounding of boots interrupting the "wild state" of these infamous lives.

Grodek: this is the name of one of the first massacres of the First World War, in September 1914, between the Russian and Austro-Hungarian armies. Hired as a nurse, witnessing the carnage, the Austrian poet Georg Trakl attempted suicide to escape the screams of the wounded soldiers – before dying three months later, prematurely demented, at the age of 27. Grodek was his last poem. Its conciseness makes it one of the most terrible visions of the horrors of war. Devin Horan's film is a striking cinematic translation of this red and black cry. " But silently gathers on the pastures of the valley / A red cloud inhabited by an angry god / The blood shed, lunar cold; / All roads lead into black rot." » Instead of giving voice to the poem, the filmmaker transposes it into an arrangement of images, texts and music that rediscovers the dazzling density of Trakl's verses. The articulation of cinema and painting draws an arc between two landscapes that are complete opposites, from the pre-impressionist image of an untouched nature (Courbet) to the expressionist vision of a cosmos with colors saturated by violence and human passions (Nolde). Red and black: from the tormented landscape emerges Trakl's face, in a self-portrait painted with the same colors of blood and night. Red and black again the long shot of a sun setting and disappearing into the clouds, while a voice recites two texts, by Dostoyevsky and Bataille, making the same observation of a humanity doomed to self-destruction. The opening trench soldiers of 1914 are met, at the end of the cinepoem, by the terribly contemporary image of two dead soldiers in Ukraine, face down in a pool of blood. In barely nine minutes, it's the most salutary history lesson.

An experimental fictional diptych centered around a teenage flâneur. A first half of elliptical fragments observes him navigating a suburb; the second half, comprising one masterful tracking shot, follows the lad as he engrossingly narrates and microcosmically restages a city-dérive.

Shot a few months before his death, the images show us the great actor in extreme close-up: first his hands, then his face, as he reads texts by Antonin Artaud and Plutarch.

"Obsada" means "film crew" in Polish, but can also mean "working group." The team in question here is twofold. First, the film crew, in front of and behind the camera, is entirely female, art and film students gathered for the occasion at the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz. The community is busy unfolding and questioning, in reverse, an action carried out in 1973 by another team, this one entirely male. The goal of this action, initiated by the famous Lodz film school, was, over 23 days, to question the collective dimension of the making of cinema. From one factory and one group to another, Wendelien van Oldenborgh continues with Obsada his lively investigation for a feminist counter-History – after that of architectural modernism in Two Stones (FID 2020), then of the invisibility of women artists from a decolonial perspective in Yesterday. (FID 2021). Here, this first involves the visibility of what is off-screen. Operating through reframing and reverse shots, both tools and objects of this investigation, Wendelien van Oldenborgh highlights her own filming conditions, thus reversing invisibilities. While the black and white archives of the event are summoned and set in motion to be questioned and become a new material, color is exposed as another issue for this group of women. A sign of Polish (masculine) modernism, here it is reappropriated: colored gels that they manipulate, monochrome clothes that they wear, tape, walls. Superimpositions, drawings, so many gestures that provoke and accompany the deployment of speech. But Obsada is not content to revisit the past. The decisive issue, from yesterday to today, is to remind us that the work remains open, Poland being, as we know, at the forefront of the liberticidal and reactionary measures introduced against women.

Danielle Arbid works at the heart of feelings, from one film to the next, the most recent Passion simple (2021) based on Annie Ernaux being the quintessence. Less well-known is a more intimate work, carried out over the long term and entitled Ma famille libanaise. From this series opened with Conversations de salon I & II (2004), Je donne à mon cœur une médaille pour t'avoir oublié is the last chapter. This series composes a sort of episodic diary, following the needs she feels to explore her relationships with those close to her (father, mother, brothers, lovers, etc.). Without a program and without any other rules than those imposed by each film, whose threads she sometimes pulls to reveal the intimate effects of the upheavals of History. The starting point of this ninth opus is a photo, intended for a lover and never sent. Real event? We suppose so, unless we keep in mind this phrase heard on the fly, evoking her favorite subject, this space between memory and reinvention, "to the point of no longer being able to decipher the line between projection and memory." The tone is set, and of this love story announced as the occasion that sparked the film, we learn little more. Carried by a pleasure in words and storytelling, Danielle Arbid opens the recesses of memories, from her childhood in Beirut to the Parisian exile due to the war, her relationship with her parents, her loves... A retrospective look winds into loops, reprises, and digressions of a life captured in shreds. From woman to child, and back, unfolds a captivated journey through time and identity. From such an undertaking, she thwarts expectations, as signaled by the work in the very material of images and voices. A paradoxical plunge for this exercise in self-construction where her character takes shape.

To bear witness, to tell, to return freshly to History, to what has been forgotten and what has not been said. The task that Wang ChuYu has undertaken with Person , his first film, is ambitious. The History is that of Taiwan revisited through a man, Mo-lin Wang, founder of the Taiwan Artist Theater. The film is made up of alternating two tableaux composed according to two visual and narrative regimes. We first hear, off-camera, Wang's story, in which he looks back on his political journey and its twists and turns, from Taiwan to so-called mainland China via Japan. It is the journey of a left-wing man, a utopian, once communist. As his story unfolds, a group of workers are busy assembling a wooden structure. It is then a text by this same Mo-lin Wang, The Waste Land – a title borrowed from the famous epic poem by TS Eliot – that two silhouettes seen behind a canvas read and comment on. The screen becomes both a veil and a page, a surface for inscription. This directorial approach plays on the contradictions of a text in which the author mainly returns to the years. Filter? Decor? Scaffolding? Metaphors, one suspects. The readings fit together, the words respond to each other or arrive at the wrong time in a fascinating pas de deux. History has multiple movements, like its modes of appearance. The author's questions rub shoulders from one tableau to another: the recent political history of Taiwan, of Mao's China or of the 1980s and its triumphant capitalism, the history of nationalism, martial law, communist utopia, socialism, the defeat of Tiananmen. Questions about the possible place, henceforth, of the notion of the person. A history with burning echoes, which "little by little becomes this dog turd that everyone avoids," in the words read by Mo-lin Wang. Wang ChuYu sketches it as a theater of speaking ghosts and mute bodies – those of workers in action, a counterpoint to the words emanating from an absent body.

What is a knight without his horse? An actor without an audience? A mother without her child? Lucie is all of these things: a working mum and wandering knight, in a film that keeps changing its setting and tone. After a relaxing stay at her grandmother's house, with whom she leaves her daughter, she suddenly discovers herself in full medieval armour amongst rolling hills. The action then shifts to an empty theatre, where Lucie – in the same suit of armour – awakes amidst the chaotic preparations for a performance of King Lear.
Lucie, played by French-Belgian actress Lucie Debay (Melody, King of the Belgians), repeatedly whispers to herself: "Don't lose track of things." This debut feature film – by film and theatre maker Claude Schmitz – reflects on life, performance, dreams, and deeds. The Covid-19 pandemic's effects on the performing arts are implicit, yet unmistakable in the existential undertone of Lucie's quest.

A pine forest. A team of forest rangers is busy there, scouting the area, measuring the trunks: soon they will be felling the trees. A machine measures the distances and produces a computer-generated image of the forest. But the movement of this image goes beyond simple topographical survey; voices communicate with the trees and reveal that the villagers call this forest "Paradise." This is why some children are reclaiming it for a wild camping trip. In this ecological fable without catastrophe, the arrangement of narrative registers and image regimes questions the relationship between humans and the forest: How to represent it? How to tell its story? And above all, how to inhabit it?

A group of veterans from the Portuguese Colonial War reunites today. Among songs and memories, the past takes over them.

An anti-war film poem, compiled from videos found on social media, archival newsreels, personal notes, and animation fragments created by the artist.

This curt first-person essay concerns the "strange legacy" of his militaristic grandfather, a professor whose violence was passed down to the director's father.

Whispered voices announce the death of a girl. Around her, kneeling teenage girls watch her, intent. Once again, they whisper and repeat in chorus "light as a feather, stiff as a board," a magic formula drawn from the depths of time that accompanies the carrying of her body, in near levitation. We are in the living room of a house, dimly lit, candles scattered everywhere, popcorn spilled on the sofa. From the outset, Site of Passage evokes, through its motifs and decor, teen movies featuring young witches and horror films from the 80s and 90s, where pajama parties turn into anguish. In Crashing Waves (FID 2021), Lucy Kerr made the reverse side of images, taken from genre cinema, her object of study. It is to reduction that she applies herself in this film, emptying her setting of all horror to retain only the invisible trace and suggest it, in a brief and stripped-down gesture. Here, no morbid stories but a series of mysterious gestures, performed by six adolescent girls with angelic faces. The lightness of the games they indulge in offers a counterpoint to the fantasized horror, despite the persistence of a disturbing strangeness. To the creaking of the parquet floor caused by the young girls' movement, the minimalist sound treatment adds a continuous background noise, that of the cinema machinery, a ghostly presence in the middle of the room. A final image shows them sinking and straightening up, supporting each other, in a game of weight and counterweight. Lucy Kerr offers a choreographic variation suspended in time, and represents adolescent sisterhood in ritualized union. As in this final painting, where the pastel colors blend into the ballet of intertwined bodies, which, in this place of passage, seem to become one.

The Zamglai nature reserve is one of the largest swamp systems in Ukraine. Its name probably derives from the Old Kurdish word 'zong' meaning 'swamp'. We look at the phenomenon of the swamp from different perspectives: as a locus of fears in the folklore of agricultural societies.

Just before the French Revolution, a group of libertines expelled from the court of Louis XVI flees for Germany, where they rendezvous with the legendary seducer and freethinker the Duc de Walchen. Their goal? Export libertinage, a philosophy centered on the rejection of morality and authority.

Deep love has finally happened in Ukraine

Using farce and derision to challenge gender, sexuality and norms, it's an extraordinary tale that's whispered to us. In a game of twisting, shifting archetypes, the artist humorously reminds us that the body, like its images, are first and foremost political objects.

Catalan director Albert Serra's follow-up to his magisterial The Death of Louis XIV is another forensic documentation of the Sun King's final breaths. Here, however, Versailles is replaced with the glow of the gallery.

An enigmatic docu-fiction hybrid which teasingly plays with expectation and mood—only revealing the specific nature of its subject-matter during its stirring, disarming finale.

Larion Lozovoy (b. 1987) repurposes eight USSR feature films (1936-1956) to underline his nation's role as the "breadbasket of Europe".

A young girl makes images, which does not bring her any income. She can hardly afford renting a room where she spends most of her time. At a certain moment, she experiences an incident that she wants to share with her brother. Will they be able to talk?

The filmmakers delve deep into the hidden socio-economic realities of central Ukraine's heavy industry, assembling a found-footage patchwork of videos shot (mainly on mobiles) and disseminated by workers via social media.

The armed conflict in eastern Ukraine has changed everything in Mariupol. The holiday region has become a dangerous exclusion zone. What's left are the memories.

In the South of Spain, a multicolored pigeon race will be won not by the fastest bird, but the one who will be able to seduce a female pigeon and fly alongside her the longest.

Four Japanese women: the first reads cards for a colleague who would like to reconnect with a teenage love; the second, barely an adult, is courted by older men but does not dare confess her feelings to the young man who works with her; the third follows in her father's footsteps and meets a man who serves as her guide; the fourth sees the return of a long-lost lover. As in Haruharasan's Recorder (Grand Prix of the FID International Competition 2021), emotion emerges from the rhythms of everyday life and surfaces from the unspoken. In this previous masterpiece by Kyoshi Sugita, fleeting rhymes, situations, first names, or echoing settings weave an emotional web of missed opportunities and feelings that are misunderstood or finally revealed.

Enter the WAR! hurls us into a sensually lo-fi, subterranean maelstrom of visual and aural sex-positive excess that recalls (and rivals) Hieronymous Bosch, Derek Jarman and the Kuchars. (NY).

While the vultures squabble over food, life carries on as usual for a small community in the Spanish mountains. The elderly teach the young to hunt. Those still too young, (im)patiently await their turn. A girl sets out with her donkey. A farewell and a new beginning.

This film is the video diary of a Ukrainian mother from Mariupol, a city close to the turbulent Donetsk Region. A series of several-minute long records of commonplace views from a window, following tracks in the snow, and strolls in the surroundings form a loving visual message for her daughter,,,

He and she are two close people in an alien city. Both of them are 24, just like their country. They have left home and now live in someone else's flats. At night they watch the lives of others, and in the daytime they have to return to the life of their own. All they have is their dreams.

Part of the crew of Honor of the Knights travels to La Mancha to see the real settings of Quixote's life in order to shoot a film.

Don Quixote and Sancho pursue their travels in search of adventure day and night. They ride through fields, talking about spirituality, chivalry and daily life. A growing bond of friendship unites them. New visual terms for a classic literary text by Catalan director Albert Serra.

A neglected boy lies, cheats and steals to get enough money for a bus ride to the big city and a ticket to see his favorite soccer team play.

In Sweden, on the set of "The Day the Clown Cried", Lewis shares the way he envisions comedy, slap stick, drama, directing and the lessons of life.

Once Upon a Time There Was a Singing Blackbird depicts 36 hours in the life of the young musician Gia, who plays the drums in the Tbilisi orchestra, and is defined as much by his friendliness as his frequent lateness.

In a lonely house by the sea, a young man, handsome and vulnerable, sees the wind of madness rising within him. A hypnotic adaptation of Maupassant's short story, with Laurent Terzieff and some of the most beautiful colors in the history of cinema. "I placed The Horla at three different levels of time, the time of Maupassant's story, the time of the character who tells this story, all of it being thrown back into the past by the tape recorder at the bottom of the boat. I called upon a painter – Claude Bellegarde – who has been working for ten years on the relationship between psychopathology and color. In The Horla there is not a single color that does not correspond, in the mind of this painter who worked with me, to a very precise relationship with an element of the character's illness.

Nossa Terra is a film about struggle, a film about urgency, shot in the midst of the guerrilla war during the armed conflict for independence in Guinea-Bissau in the mid-1960s. Before becoming a committed filmmaker, Mario Marret had been a member of the Resistance, an anarchist activist, a radio operator, and an explorer. Moving within French anti-colonial activist circles, he became close to the PAIGC (the movement for the independence of Guinea and Cape Verde), which was then interested in cinema as a tool of combat. He would be the first filmmaker to go into the maquis. "It was a testimony. No matter the format, no matter the camera, no matter all these things, a filmmaker was there. The filmmaker must be where the world is being made and when it is being made

After his girl leaves him for someone else, Herbert gets really depressed and starts searching for a job. He finally finds one in a big house which is inhabited by many, many women. Can he live in the same home with all these females?