FIDMarseille 2023

<p>At the time of his death in September 2022, Jean-Luc Godard had been in the midst of planning another feature, an adaptation of Belgian author Charles Plisnier&rsquo;s 1937 novel&nbsp;<em>Faux Passports.&nbsp;</em>Though the film was not fated to be, the intricate and beautiful &ldquo;trailer&rdquo; that Godard put together in preparation now stands as his final work, a complex collage of history, politics, and cinema constructed of paper and glue, paintings and photographs, sound and silence. A Kino Lorber release.</p>

<p>Stefan, a Romanian construction worker living in Brussels, is on the verge of moving back home. He cooks up a big pot of soup with leftovers in his fridge as a goodbye gift for friends and family. As he is about to leave, he meets a young Belgian-Chinese woman who is working in a little restaurant while researching her doctorate on mosses. Her attention to the near-invisible stops him in his tracks.</p> <p>A hunter-gatherer of beauty in urban landscapes, Bas Devos knows how to tell stories through images. Berlinale audiences beheld this talent in his films&nbsp;<em>Violet</em>&nbsp;(<em>Generation</em>, 2014) and&nbsp;<em>Hellhole</em>&nbsp;(<em>Panorama</em>, 2019). In&nbsp;<em>Here</em>, the Belgian filmmaker&rsquo;s ability to register the invisible and the untold performs many a small c. Unfolding in beautiful tableaux in 4:3 format, his work features characters in whose presence we want to feel the here and now, just as they do. Observing his central duo, played by the radiant Stefan Gota and Liyo Gong, as they discover each other, Devos&rsquo; gaze is as moving as it is delicate. And what more solid way for a bond to grow between two people than with their feet firmly rooted in Mother Nature&rsquo;s soft carpeting? It is more fragile than cement, but it is our true terrain.</p>

<p>A triptych of images set within a widescreen frame,&nbsp;<em>The Daughters of Fire&nbsp;</em>is a musical of ecstasy and ache featuring singers Elizabeth Pinard, Alice Costa, and Karyna Gomes as women separated from one another following the eruption of the volcanic Fogo island in Cape Verde. This short film from Pedro Costa (<em>Vitalina Varela,&nbsp;</em>NYFF57), whose best-known work highlights the beauty of Lisbon&rsquo;s struggling immigrant communities, summons something entirely entrancing, pushing his art to rhapsodic new heights. A Cinema Guild release.</p>

<h6><span style="font-size:14px">Linda is unfairly punished by her mother, Paulette, who will do anything to make it up to her. Even a chicken with peppers when she can&#39;t cook. Linda really wants to have the chicken that her father made that day...But there is a strike, and the shops are closed.</span></h6>

<p>An 86-year-old man prowls the proscenium of a crumbling theater, his naked body stretches and bends, illuminated under glaring lights or hidden by shadow, always heaving with the weight of history. This is Wang Xilin, one of China&rsquo;s leading classical composers, who becomes the passionate narrator of his life, art, and political persecution against the dramatic backdrop of Paris&rsquo;s Th&eacute;&acirc;tre des Bouffes du Nord. Whether emotionally relating the abuse suffered at the hands of the Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, describing how he translated personal and historical pain into the furious abstraction of his symphonies, or simply displaying his miraculously persistent flesh, the musician is at once witness to history, grand storyteller, and physical evidence of his own torment. With director Wang Bing&rsquo;s tirelessly circling, endlessly compassionate camera and the striking use of Wang Xilin&rsquo;s glorious music, which buffets, buoys, or sometimes drowns out the composer&rsquo;s words,&nbsp;<em>Man in Black</em>&nbsp;is an overwhelming sensory experience that speaks to the power of creation amidst human deprivation.&nbsp;An Icarus Films release.</p>

<p>Several professional actors and non-actor professionals portray a dynamic of human-nature relationship in one of the most active stratovolcano in the world, Mount Merapi. In the shadows of recent eruptions, these actors play a story that is written together with volcanologist, sand miner, and a mystic&mdash;people who have a close bond with the mountain, potentially illustrating fiction and nonfiction situations that could and would have happened in Merapi. Formed in between factual and fictional, future and past, material and incorporeal, scientific and magic, Monisme trips to the place where actuality is intertwined with myth and legend.</p>

<p>Eva, a film editor, and her assistant Rami are working on a film about blind people. A melancholy reflection on cinema and images.</p>

<p>A colorfully painted apartment complex: Flippa sits in her room surrounded by drawings. She smokes, writes in her diary, the Go-Go-Goths sing, &quot;And some days I just can&#39;t take it.&quot; Her mother disappeared a long time ago, likewise her big sister &ndash; and any belief in unconditional love. Michelangelo&#39;s &quot;Creation of Adam&quot; in 3-D embellishes a postcard, a sign of life sent by sister Furia who took off years ago for a &quot;mother and child resort&quot; in Barronconi, Sardinia. Flippa hits the road. On the soundtrack, her thoughts alternate with the narrative voice of the Heavenly Mother as spoken by Susanne Bredeh&ouml;ft. In Sardinia, Furia will reveal to Flippa that paradise is not a place to long for freedom. This is exactly why you have to escape it. Inga Busch, another icon of the Berlin Volksb&uuml;hne, agrees, &quot;Man, there are chances you just have to try.&quot; Later Flippa is seen chain-sawing baby Jesus off a wooden Mother of God statue. The witches of Barranconi party with surprised villagers, guys from a camping site, &shy;and the camera in pursuit of the most beautiful, spontaneous impulses unfolding under the Sardinian sun. An intoxicating atmosphere of exploration and discovery sets in. When Flippa explains her way of reading Jane Austen to a young man who wants to accompany her to Corsica, she wears a dental brace &shy;&ndash; just for fun. In the end, an organ-slurred cover-version is heard of Thee Oh Sees&#39; break-up hymn &quot;The Axis&quot;: I don&#39;t want to see you in the morning / I will never lay by your side / And by the time you hear these words / Your wicked face will be gone from my mind. Back in the days of Jimi Hendrix and &quot;Axis: Bold as Love,&quot; love was capable of shifting the very axis of the world. Flippa&#39;s generation, by no means timid, battles with the &quot;heterosexual knot &ndash; the very moment you love what love can&#39;t salvage&quot;. (Regina Schlagnitweit)</p>

<p>In the postcard-perfect setting of Martinique, a group of friends get together to talk about their relationship with the island and with mainland France. Their conversations sketch the portrait of a youth from overseas.</p>

<p>Love triangles have long delighted cinema, literature and the tabloids. For his second film (after&nbsp;<em>The World is Full of Secrets</em>, which explored the workings of fear), Graham Swon uses this simple plot as the basis for a highly original cinematic experience. Somewhere in the Midwest at the end of the 1930s, an intimate portrait of three protagonists: Barbara, a writer forbidden from writing in her youth; her husband Richard, author of airport novels of limited success; and their dedicated maid Martha (the bewitching Deragh Campbell). With these ingredients of a provincial, bourgeois melodrama (the film never completely relinquishes them), along with a few dashes of political critique (men fare better socially), Graham Swon leads his film a long way from naturalism.</p> <p><br /> The three voices, interwoven like swansongs, explore the recesses and secrets of memory, of fantasized lives, of restorative thoughts and dreams.<br /> Obsessions, superimposed lives, thwarted or tragic destinies, the narrative is fluid and changing, playing with superimpositions and fades, overplaying hushed, sweet, ethereal, and nocturnal atmospheres to the point of dizziness, as well as revisited stylistic elements of pre-war cinema. Streams of consciousness (reminiscent of Virginia Woolf&rsquo;s&nbsp;<em>The Waves</em>) come together to dissolve as much as to lead us astray. These stories of love and frustration evoke a certain past America, but also a whole field of cinema, carried to faraway shores.</p> <p>Nicolas Feodoroff</p>

<p>A foreigner crossed the Mediterranean. There he is in the Italian Alps; here we are, spectators of the political and media trial in which he was dragged: &quot;Who are you? What are you doing here and where do you come from?&quot; To that eye observing him, the stranger did say nothing and instead he wrote a poem. &quot;At the beginning there was Pangea, then the image of the earth blew up.&quot;</p>

<p>Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevičius&rsquo; alluring period piece&nbsp;<strong>Twittering Soul</strong>&nbsp;is set in the late 1800s, yet it is haunted by the spectre of the twentieth century. It&rsquo;s the dawn of automobiles, human aviation, psychoanalysis and of course, cinema. Indifferent to, but not ignorant of, these historical upheavals, a small wooded village in southern Lithuania prepares for doomsday.</p> <p>Two women discuss afterlife, an itinerant musician witnesses strange happenings on his journey, accounts of stones that grow in size and float in the air, a band of faeries weave busily away in a cottage, a feudal lord pores over an optical contraption as his daughter is warned about the witches that haunt a nearby tree. The nature of these events remains mysterious, the connection between them tenuous. Like Breughel&rsquo;s&nbsp;<em>Netherlandish Proverbs</em>, the film weaves them into a sumptuous, mystical rural tapestry embodying a distinct, pre-modern conception of life and beyond.</p> <p>Narkevičius draws his material liberally from Lithuanian folk song, superstitions, sayings, prayers and games, concocting a work that hovers between reality, fantasy, dreams and visions. Presented in stereoscopic 3D and shot with a painterly attention to light,&nbsp;<strong>Twittering Soul</strong>&nbsp;gazes at once into the past and the future.</p>

<p>H&auml;nsel and Gretel, a garden gnome, Wagner: this is no fairy tale, but a critical and satirical excursion into the very soul of an anti-Semitic German far right.</p>

<p>TROUBLE is the second part of a project that uses archive photographs to explore a history of bombing. While puzzling over aerial photographs from early 20th century Iraq and Egypt, a filmmaker finds herself increasingly unsettled by images that want to share their violent secrets. England has been colonised by a marauding spirit and the Empire&rsquo;s undead start to speak back to the film&rsquo;s troubled investigator. Moving between the recent past and the distant past, this film is a ghost story that explores horror -- both real and imagined.</p>

<p>Franco Piavoli is one of the most important directors among Italian independent panorama. Through the years, He built one unique and authentic cinematographic grammar. Born in 1933, He spent his whole life in Pozzolengo, a small village near Garda&rsquo;s lake. There, He imagined, wrote and - for the most part - shot his own works. We visited him in his house, with us only two reels in super 8mm, and asked him to tell us about his next movie. The result is the story of a lost paradise that vanishes into Adam and Eve, the reminiscence of a walk and an eternal desire of love.</p>

<p>In the boredom of a wandering evening, three friends have fun reflecting on the symbolism of the Jeddah fountain in Saudi Arabia. A film about Saudi youth who moves in search of freedom.</p>

<p>Le massif du Mont-Blanc, en trois chapitres, trois regards pour dire la fonte des glaciers, le d&eacute;gel du permafrost. Savoirs inform&eacute;s et perceptions sensibles dialoguent.</p>

<p>Four portraits of women and men, echoing the writings of Hannah Arendt: against the violence of the past and present, reflecting asserts itself as a force for creation and resistance.</p>

<p>A conversation between the filmmaker and his father, separated by the war in Syria. Now a refugee in Germany, the son reconstructs the journey of his father, who was a student there 70 years earlier.</p>

<p>Sofia, 23, has a baby face, short hair, and a red cap screwed on her head. Ordered to leave the apartment where she is staying, she decides to kill time on the campus of the University of S&atilde;o Paulo, where she goes as a tattoo artist, not as a student. With extreme destitution, the film depicts the wanderings of this secretive, mysteriously stubborn character, who refuses to be deciphered and shows herself to be full of resistance, in a tragic sensuality. Sofia Foi advances by ellipses and evocations, throughout the day and night, at the whim of encounters with friends or classmates. Also solitary and enigmatic figures, they appear, frozen, observant and motionless, as if carrying a strangely muted and silent revolt. Through Sofia, Pedro Geraldo depicts the contours of a marginal and vulnerable youth, precarious, lost on the edge of a world that threatens them, lost between the full and empty spaces of a campus that does not protect them. Filmed in fixed shots in beautiful chiaroscuro with greenish tones, the nooks and crannies of the university are disturbing. The director establishes a serious and somber sound and visual regime, which redoubles Sofia&#39;s isolation. Her sibylline face and her unfathomable eyes, filmed in close-ups, are at times transfigured by sublime superimpositions; they represent the nostalgia for a love brutally interrupted, a disappearance to come. The film is shaped from absences, in which lies, it seems, the face of a death that looks at us: Sofia, faith.</p>

<p>Fadhel Messaoudi, a master of Oriental lute, has been in a serious car accident. He is between life and death. Will he still be able to play? Does he still want to live? You are Abou Hourayra, the musician&#39;s double, and you are going to help him make a choice. The adventure is about to begin: press Start.</p>

<p>In a fable made by hyper-mechanisms of the future, a message in an algorithmic bottle relives a story of extinction from the past to a clay humanoid in the present.</p>

<p>Two men, a nondescript space, some trees outside, a large glass table inside. These are the only visual elements in this minimalist reflection on human cruelty. Due to this pared-down approach, the focus lies entirely on the testimonies that director Selma Doborac has the actors Christoph Bach and Cornelius Obonya recite&mdash;separately, as if in an interrogation. Detached, without emotion, they recount experiences from an existence as a cog in a machine of mass destruction. These are monologues from the darkest recesses of human nature.</p> <p>For the script, Doborac drew on historical sources (legal documents, testimonies stored in archives), but also on more philosophical considerations. Here and there, words and sentences pass by that are associated with the great tragedies of the 20th century&mdash;mass graves, &ldquo;cockroaches,&rdquo; gas chambers. But the outrages are disconnected from any specific history. They have merged into one single stream of mass violence, deeply engrained in humanity. The emotionless delivery makes the film even more moving.</p>

<p>Somewhere in the Paris suburbs, teenagers are mysteriously disappearing. Somewhere between investigation and science fiction, subtly looking back at the massacre of 17 October 1961 and the question of memory.</p>

<p>A ventriloquist, a political speech, Nino Ferrer and advertisements for new districts paint a satirical portrait of an era with fascist overtones.</p>

<p>A young woman closes her eyes: in the darkness of the screen and the night, she recites O Marinheiro, by Fernando Pessoa. Dreams replace reality in the frightening wait for sunrise.</p>

<p>Djibril is in his early twenties, his pockets are empty, the girl he loves doesn&rsquo;t want a child with him, his mother is too symbiotic and his mixed-raced father never left Africa to meet him. His desires are as strong as the abysses that haunt him. Without a warning, he leaves the idyll deep in the countryside and flees to Marseille to meet an old friend and his son, find a job in the port city in full reconstruction, dream of leaving for Africa in the footsteps of his own story, and ours. Thus starts his oblivious meandering, from tiled roofs to damaged asphalt roads, from activists&rsquo; bars to small venues that never close, opening himself to new encounters. He creates new bonds, immediately powerful. Only love can save, they all know that. But reality lies in ambush and isn&rsquo;t any more tender to lost children than to free pirates &ndash; Menouar, the thief-filmmaker, knows it only too well, he who will risk his last breath there.</p>

<p>Scientific testing has established that the figurine travelled a long way to the place where she was found. This is important, as is the discovery of more than 130 similar figures across Europe. The film imagines an expansive genealogy of ancestors: who might the &ldquo;130 sisters&rdquo; be for us today? A sisterly group of women moves across the screen to pass on their stories and those of their ancestors, and to immortalize them. The lines continue, becoming a long list that juxtaposes various personalities in an abstracted way. Together with cross-generational, interdisciplinary intellectual, political, and artistic role models or &ldquo;grandmothers&rdquo; like here Joan Jonas and Laurie Anderson, the artist invokes informally&mdash;by first name&mdash;personal relatives of the performers and women from within her own milieu.</p>

<p>In a voice-over, Claire Doyon is reading a text by Silvia Federici. The text elaborates on the role of psychology in the preservation of the patriarchal system and of capitalism; it analyses the methods used by psychologists to promote adaptation to social structures rather than their dismantling. The arguments are illustrated on screen, first by shots of assembly lines and menial tasks being performed. But very soon, the shots overpower the words: images of freed bodies, of a young woman. This is Penelope, the director&rsquo;s daughter, on the autism spectrum, who provides a visual escape from the implacable realities that fill our ears.</p>

<p>On this May 1st, 1986, a strange dust floats in the air. Between yesterday and today, a stroll through Paris and the images, as strident as they are irradiated.</p>

<p>A woman patiently cleans her chimney and tidies up her domestic space. Around her unfolds an Irish landscape, and a superimposed text unveils its still topical story, marked by England&rsquo;s domination, that even Thatcher&rsquo;s death will not erase. A voice-over refers to a tale by the Grimm brothers, Town Musicians of Bremen, analyzing the rise and fall of the European leftists movements.</p>

<p>Yves crosses the centuries and returns to the small village of Saint-Jean-du Doigt. During his wanderings, he meets a shaman in touch with the spirits, a painter in search of the light, a storyteller who initiates him into the secrets of traditional Breton songs, and a mystic who tells him about the forgiveness of Saint John. Queen Anne of Brittany and her knight join him in his quest and reveal to him the mysteries of his origin.</p>

<p>Through her writing, painting and ceramics, Yoshimi, tries to come to terms with the loss of a loved one under the weight of the Hiroshima disaster.</p>

<p>A group of friends decides to visit a forest on the outskirts of the city, despite the warning and restrictions placed due to a strange moss that has recently invaded the area. The characters play, sing, and display their bodies freely in this area, where reality warps gradually, and intertwines with their stories. fantasies and dreams.</p>

<p>In ceremonial costume, a group of chilangos negotiate with motorcyclists from a rival neighborhood, planning a reenactment of Victory Night, when Hern&aacute;n Cort&eacute;s and his army were driven out of Tenochtitlan. With jittery-smooth video and sparing use of an accredited historian, Julio Hern&aacute;ndez Cord&oacute;n explores the significance of the 500-year-old Tree of La Noche Triste, climbing the fence with his subject-collaborators to survey its charred remains.</p>

<p>His lover since 1982, Herv&eacute; Couergou became filmmaker Lionel Soukaz&#39;s partner during the painful first years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. They share their friends, lovers, creation, moments of despair and joy, their life so to say. Artists in troubled areas, from a diary that will span 2000 hours over</p>

<p>June is dating a married director. Marian has been hired to write a screenplay. The two friends share their experiences and thoughts on relationships and power without taboos or restraint.</p>

<p>Surrounded by the ferocity of the world, five young artists try to transcend contemporary anxiety through a collective production that is itself the subject of the play performed in front of an audience and during which the film was shot. Taking refuge in legendary Hôtel du Belvédère at the French-Spanish border, they attempt a chaotic search from Beethoven, an anachronistic example of a heroic overcoming of the catastrophe: making music without hearing it, anyway. A story of depression and ecstasy between pathetic and poetic. The existential vertigo of creation as a casual allegory of a consented collective shipwreck. You have to remember that this is a comic film.</p>

<p>In Paris, when the curfew comes, people go home. Every morning, someone wakes up alone. At night, a woman tells a taxi driver about her illness. Time weaves together to ward off separation.</p>

<p>Filmed in Tokyo and Yokohama, OF GIRLS brings a variety of contemporary voices in resonance with two distinct female voices from Japan&rsquo;s literary and political past. Both popular authors of their time&mdash;the period from the late 1920s on&mdash;Fumiko Hayashi and Yuriko Miyamoto both died young, in 1951. They each had a strong feminist and class consciousness as well as an impressive literary voice, but came from very different backgrounds and expressed their ideals through different paths.</p>

<p>By filming her Portuguese lessons, Ukrainian filmmaker Daryna Mamaisur ( I Stumble Every Time I Hear From Kyiv , VdR 2023) creates a moving puzzle between filmed diary and essay. Through associations of images and words, she continues to poetically formulate the disaster that affects her life as an indissoluble cinematic link between the here of exile and the elsewhere of war.</p>

<p>On Ushant, where Jean Epstein retired to film &ldquo;Finis Terrae&rdquo; (1928), exploring the means of cinema to question reality. A century later, where do we stand?</p>

<p>Drift through a changing Marseille with three of its inhabitants. Three ways of existing in the world brought together in the film to form a community and overcome the obstacles of life.</p>

<p>In the heart of Brittany, Jean embarks on a crazy soliloquy on the trail of the asphodels. Walking the entire path with him, the camera meets the inhabitants and the memories that populate these places, in documentary scenes from the past as well as the present. A journey through space and time, The Trail of the Asphodels explores history as well as geographical motifs, fauna and flora, legends and songs, everything that materially constitutes a territory.</p>

<p>A young man writes in a notebook, on the banks of the river, while we hear, off-screen, the sentences recited by his inner voice. The waters of the Danube flow, majestic, like the sentences of Claudio Magris, for whom the young man is here the alter ego. The story begins when the traveling writer decides to turn around and go back to the mythical source of the river: a poorly closed tap, somewhere, in a house. The landscapes follow one another as he goes upstream, splendid views sensualized by the 16mm material. From Magris&#39;s Danube to Die Donau , from the text to the image, everything seems to flow naturally in the same wide and slow flow of beauty and intelligence. But from these familiar banks, the film quickly overflows to create other, far more singular relationships between the written and the image. As if called by the writer&#39;s voice, a young fugitive comes to meet him. First to himself, then facing the camera, he tells the story of his escape in a hallucinatory monologue, full of bursts and ellipses, as if a film were being edited in the character&#39;s head. It is at the end of the story, when the book is in the hands of the young fugitive who has become a reader, that the film reveals its true and enigmatic depth. Who writes, who speaks, what dictates and who listens? Can we, contrary to the laziness of adaptation, set out towards an older, more secret source, a source common to literature and cinema? With this falsely wise film, moving and shimmering like the surface of the river, Jaume Claret Muxart has set out on his journey.</p>

<p>People coming and going at a bus station. Various textures of light and darkness. Voices reminiscing about past loves are superimposed over the film&#39;s images, as stories of encounters and partings are born.</p>

<p>Four people who, originally, do not know each other, spend a week on holiday together, each year, for as long as possible. The project is thought as a time for collective thinking regarding the place each individual occupies, a dialogue between the visions of the different members that compose the family: how is a family built? Can the relationships that unite the different members be stimulated? By simulating family life, is it possible to create real relationships between people? Does the undetermined length of the project allow the creation of intimate relationships?</p>

<p>It&rsquo;s the end of summer after the final exams, and tomorrow Rosa will be leaving France for Montreal to start dance school. Tonight, she&rsquo;s having a party with her friends at a place by the sea that they call &ldquo;the island.&rdquo; They spend the night drinking, smoking, chatting, laughing, crying, fighting and kissing, until dawn comes and they have to say goodbye&mdash;to each other, but also to their shared childhood.</p> <p>The Island is both a fiction and a making-of film: scenes alternate between the beach and rehearsal room where the young actors (who use their own names in both cinematic layers) receive notes from the director or explore their roles through improvisation. Movement plays an important role; the film is like a choreography, a dance of befriended bodies, accompanied by recurring dialogue and commentary. It&rsquo;s a farewell that is repeated until it becomes inevitable.</p>

<p>Or a train in which they live, stopped, going nowhere. But nowhere, here is a place, precious: a large and beautiful building with stone walls invaded by ivy, which open onto the fields, the sky and a complete silence. Cl&eacute;mence and others have found refuge there. Here, it is a question of slowing down and the film understands it. Long shots focus on simple gestures (hanging out the washing, rolling cigarettes). They give us time to approach the protagonists and appreciate the events which, in the silence, take their place: the song of the birds, the breathing of nature under the caress of the wind, a crumpled piece of paper. Nothing forces the door, the faces, the words. If the latter are rare, it is above all because they are not rushed. Cl&eacute;ment Roussier and Hadrien Mossaz organize it, simply exchanged, or serious when it formulates, without the weight of testimony, the breaking point, if not the collapse, which led to this retreat far from the violence of the world. Through a sober staging that embraces the daily life and rhythm of each person, the directorial duo translates a regime of attention in which the delicacy and gentleness of the film are housed, as well as the possibility of care. They foreground the impossibility of a clear dividing line between who would or would not play a role, questioning our immediate inclination to the distribution of places and statuses. Sometimes the outside world makes itself known. A world that must be joined, that must be re-experienced. And it is in the chaos of the roaring city that we leave the character of Cl&eacute;mence, swept away by a superb final tracking shot, on the Corniche Kennedy in Marseille, on the threshold of a new beginning. &quot;The most important thing is never put into words.&quot; Perhaps the great challenge faced by the two directors was to put it into images.</p>

<p>Wishes, dreams, plans for the future: every day they are spoken aloud, like an incantation. A record of a future being constructed slowly, night by night. A cinematic chronicle of the life of a Guaran&iacute;-speaking Paraguayan community living in Cuenca, Spain. A weave of experiences in which filming is like existing.</p>

<p>Through multiple screens, men and women recount their most vivid dreams. The series of portraits becomes an exploration of the collective unconscious in a time of crisis.</p>

<p>A boy in the throes of adolescence plays an online suicide game. 50 days, 50 challenges: a chronicle of leaving the world.</p>

<p>Marina&rsquo;s face suddenly changed. As in a Kafka-esque nightmare, one day around her thirties her face ceased to be what it was. Who is she now? Through Marina&rsquo;s story, the film delves into a reflection around the meaning of the face, emblem of our identity and nerve center of how we connect with others, human or non-human. Can we be somebody beyond our face, beyond our image?</p>

<p>While the matriarch of the Bechtani clan wants to clear out the family land and sell it, her son and granddaughter live within nature in a fully mystical way, paying heed to coincidences and signs that announce a coming social revolution.</p>

<p>Grandma grows a pair of wings and transforms into a human bird. She steps out of the darkness of a tunnel into a desolate misty landscape. She is above clouds, floating into where birds soar, above ground as bodies in levitation. The video tickles our senses and emotions towards loosing sense of gravity.</p>

<p>In the heart of Bairro Alto, right in the centre of Lisbon, the building of an old printing workshop is demolished to make way for luxury apartments. Seeing this as a perfect image for the death of a certain Lisbon in the wake of the financial crisis and the ensuing real estate and touristic boom.</p>

<p>An intimate documentary on friendships, language, love, youth, resistance, and identity of class, caste, religion, and gender. Set in the backdrop of the nationwide 2019-2020 student protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in India.</p>

<p>The video shows women nurturing each other and a baby. We see fish and other marine creatures, a sauna, the autumn sea &ndash; contrasts of heat and cold. The gallery were it is screened is heated to resemble human body temperature.</p>

<p>A video work explores the migration of other-than-humans, poetically navigating and providing deeper context surrounding questions of borders and immigration.</p>

<p>Maria (Ace Swiss Director) and Satindar (Drunk Indian filmmaker) fall in love, but his inherited alcoholism hinders their future together. Will love win? Or will alcohol drown it? A deliciously dangerous love cocktail.</p>

<p>The cursor moves across a digital map, leaving the coast to explore a uniformly blue sea, its restless movements evoking the wrench of exile. 30 years after her father fled Croatia, Karla Crnčević recuperates the videotapes he shot the day he returned to his village when the war was over &ndash; the only images he ever filmed. The father&rsquo;s voice, in the present tense, accompanies the recordings of the devastation but, little by little, the two narratives, visual and audio, subtly begin to diverge. The film weaves itself into this discrepancy, like an essay on memory and archive, on memory as the incomplete process of recreation, on the surprising wild flowers emerging among the ruins of the past.</p>

<p>A 2022 Finnish language documentary written AND directed by Vieno J&auml;rventausta, Lauri Julkunen and 1 other. The film screened at 2 festivals, including DocPoint &amp; FIDMarseille.</p>

<p>Amina Handke adapts the 1967 theatre play Kaspar written by her father Peter Handke. Instead of a young man being tortured by language, we meet an old woman played by the director&rsquo;s mother, Libgart Schwarz, who loses her linguistic abilities while rehearsing for the very same play. What begins as a pure and playful family meta-fiction turns into a surreal, partly nonsensical Babylonian confusion, it&rsquo;s just that it&rsquo;s not different languages that are clashing but layers and fragments of the German language, the language of the father. The film avoids the traps of representational cinema. It&rsquo;s all noises and muttering, injunctions and an almost Dadaist pleasure in repeating sentences until they completely lose their meaning. &times;</p>

<p>Nearly 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were massacred in Srebrenica in the summer of 1995. Kumjana Novakova and Guillermo Carreras-Candi have managed to get hold of archival footage that was shot at the time by the Serbian forces. Twenty years later, they confront these devastating images of the past with the current landscape of the former enclave, which still bears the scars of overwhelming collective grief.</p>

<p>When a small village is plundered, a family is forced to flee. The two oldest children, Kyona and Adriel, are quickly separated from their parents facing the road of exile alone. They embark on a heroic journey which takes them from childhood to adolescence in search of shelter and peace.</p>

<p>A 2020 short film directed by Laure Prouvost. The film screened at FIDMarseille in 2023.</p>

<p>A 2020 short film directed by Laure Prouvost. The film screened at FIDMarseille in 2023.</p>

<p>Genevi&egrave;ve Garland, a renowned actress, goes to relax in her native village with her sick son. While everyone urges him to return, Genevi&egrave;ve seems to be fleeing certain realities that are difficult to admit.</p>

<p>They Parlaient Id&eacute;ale reflects on what it means to be a citizen of a nation, especially when one&#39;s identity is rather ambiguous. A cross-generational and interracial cast of performers embark on a road trip from Grigny, a suburb of Paris, to the French pavilion at the Venice Biennial.</p>

<p>A 2019 short film directed by Laure Prouvost. The film screened at FIDMarseille in 2023.</p>

<p>Like a fast-paced word game, images, words and sensations are jumbled together, drawing us to rediscover the joy of learning language and meaning.</p>

<p>A non-narrative video work that depicts the back of the artist&#39;s naked body standing in a field intercut with images of leaves, flowers, cats, and caterpillars.</p>

<p>Laure Prouvost created a bucolic conversation between women.</p>

<p>Young widow Susan Vernon visits her in-laws&#39; estate in anticipation of the social conversation about her personal indiscretions. There she decides to find a husband for herself and her daughter. With the help of an old friend, she attracts the attention of interesting men.</p>

<p>A surfeit of proposals for what a museum could look like: kissed floors and massaged walls, a Zumba class in the entrance hall, a wave to surf to erase the dusty past, birds flying in and there is room for a huge, milk-spraying breast.</p>

<p>An exploration into the notion of lust after a time of darkness, digging into the subconscious of the character, deep into his fantasies.</p>

<p>Centering on the problems as well as the possibilities of memory and forgetting, the piece addresses the arbitrary distinctions that can be ascribed to power and possession.</p>

<p>A 2014 short film directed by Laure Prouvost. The film screened at FIDMarseille in 2023.</p>

<p>Inspired by the aesthetic and sensuous pleasures of Italy and referencing the genre of panoramic painting, Swallow shows fragments of footage, from birds to women bathing in waterfalls, exploring language and translation.</p>

<p>Prouvost offers us &#39;that&#39;s real, that&#39;s not&#39; lessons in representation, reflections on the art-heritage industry and freewheeling storytelling, all washed down with an obligatory cup of tea.</p>

<p>A partner to Wantee, we&#39;re instantly seduced by Grandma&#39;s Dream &ndash; carpets, dancing, silky bottoms, planes that are half-teapot, half-plane serving tea from the sky, and where conceptual art takes care of dinner.</p>

<p>Violet is a college student looking to change life at her university. Together with her friends Rose and Heather, she takes &ldquo;nice&rdquo; transfer student Lily under her wing, who quickly catches the attention of both playboy Charlie (Adam Brody) and dream student Xavier.</p>

<p>A 2010 short film directed by Laure Prouvost. The film screened at FIDMarseille in 2023.</p>

<p>A 2010 short film directed by Laure Prouvost. The film screened at FIDMarseille in 2023.</p>

<p>A 2010 short film directed by Laure Prouvost. The film screened at FIDMarseille in 2023.</p>

<p>A 2010 short film directed by Laure Prouvost. The film screened at FIDMarseille in 2023.</p>

<p>A 2009 short film directed by Laure Prouvost. The film screened at FIDMarseille in 2023.</p>

<p>A door slams shut, the film begins. &#39;Thank you for coming&#39;, the artist says laconically. For a split second spectators glimpse an image of a fresh lung.</p>

<p>A 2008 short film directed by Laure Prouvost. The film screened at FIDMarseille in 2023.</p>

<p>The video is of a self-proclaimed curator of artists video works explaining what he sees as the role and function of video art, quoting Walter Benjamin along the way.</p>

<p>A 2006 short film directed by Laure Prouvost. The film screened at FIDMarseille in 2023.</p>

<p>A 2005 short film directed by Laure Prouvost. The film screened at FIDMarseille in 2023.</p>

<p>The final entry in Whit Stillman&#39;s &ldquo;trilogy,&rdquo; brimming with the writer-director&#39;s trademark dry humor, The Last Days of Disco is a cleverly comic look at the early 1980s Manhattan party scene from the vantage point of the late nineties, an affectionate yet unsentimental look at the end of an era.</p>

<p>Phantom Beirut is set in Lebanon at the end of the 1980s, as Khalil returns home after ten years of absence. A decade earlier, during the civil war, Khalil used the cover of chaos and fire during a battle to fake his own death and acquire a new identity.</p>

<p>An American working in Barcelona, having sworn off beautiful women, is forced to be host to his playboy cousin in this witty comedy of good intentions and mixed signals.</p>

<p>A group of young upper-class Manhattanites are blithely passing through the gala debutante season, when an unusual outsider joins them and stirs them up.</p>

<p>A man decides to renounce his stagnant marital life to explore his homosexual inclinations.</p>

<p>Improvisation by Paul Vecchiali and Fran&ccedil;oise Lebrun &ndash; On Paul&#39;s initiative, Fran&ccedil;oise and Paul met after a long separation, on the pretext to search in commun for a lost memory, a song. It soon appears that Paul&#39;s objective is to win her back.</p>

<p>Fran&ccedil;oise comes back to her hometown 18 years after the brutal death of her husband. She is determined to commit a murder.</p>

<p>A documentary on the life of Ed Pincus and his immediate family from 1971 to 1976.</p>

<p>Pierre Lentier murders an 8-year-old in horrendous circumstances. This 30-something solitary factory worker who lives on the edge of society is sentenced to death. A damning indictment of the death penalty and the manipulative behavior of the media.</p>

<p>The fantasies and dreams of two over-the-hill actresses are intertwined with their realities, as the two roommates struggle to survive their day-to-day lives in the expensive and difficult world of Paris. In the end, their struggles are eased when the widow of a man they had both been married to gives them a small legacy.</p>

<p>A film projectionist longs to be a detective, and puts his great skills to work when he is framed by a rival for stealing his girlfriend&#39;s father&#39;s pocketwatch. His girlfriend solves the crime and he has little luck until he dreams himself into a mystery movie as the renowned detective Sherlock Jr.</p>

<p>Two farmhands share a cottage full of mechanical devices for making life easy. They are rivals for the farmer&#39;s daughter. Keaton, disguised as a scarecrow, causes trouble for his rival and the farmer. When Keaton stoops to tie his shoe, the girl accepts what she thinks is his kneeling proposal.</p>

<p>Curnier Jardin&rsquo;s project thus reveals a hidden history related to the Venetian monastery. Recent research shows that the parlour of the religious institution was used as a theatrical stage by the nuns who occasionally performed in front of their family members and Venetian authorities. Such carnival-like performances allowed the nuns to wear profane clothes and to suspend the social rules that forced them into a monastic life.</p>