Sylvie Blanc

Documentary short that explores the meaning of the locals’ African identity through the Carnival festivities.

Based on documents compiled by leading French philosopher Michel Foucault, this unique and original film charts the gruesome events which took place in a Normandy village in 1835, when a young man, Pierre Rivière, murdered his mother, sister and brother before fleeing to the countryside. With a cast made up of real-life villagers from the area where the events took place, the detailed re-enactments and careful attention to the gestures of their ancestors serve to create an intense and sometimes disturbing atmosphere of hyper-realism. Details of the crime and of the trial that followed are told from varied perspectives, including the written confession of Pierre himself, and form a rich and complex narrative that interrogates the concepts of “truth” and “history”.

A deserter who has lost all hope meets with a little girl in a ruined city.

This black-and-white film – the first road movie of Algerian cinema – presents one of the most readily apparent, though subtle, transformations of the daily life of the people of Algeria brought about by the ordeal of French occupation and the war of liberation. With military repression in full force, a peasant woman finds herself alone in her house in the mountains when her only son is taken away by French soldiers soon after her husband is killed in a raid. One day, on seeing a dead chicken, which she considers a bad omen, she decides to leave home, and sets off on a tiring journey through the mountains. With a pair of chickens in tow, she moves from one detention camp to the next in a desperate search for her missing son. The film was inspired by events experienced by the family of its director.

A study of conscience set against the trial of Eichmann in Israel.

In 1962, René Vautier, together with some Algerian friends, organised the audio-visual formation centre Ben Aknoun to encourage a "dialogue in images" between the two factions. Together with his students he made a film that shows the history of the Algerian War and of the ALN (National Liberation Army), and life during the reconstruction.

A man developes an obsession with a wig.

At the beginning of the Korean war, the love story, in a remote village, between a young worker and the daughter of a traditional musician.

Amid a revolution in a South American mining outpost, a band of fugitives - a roguish adventurer, a local hooker, a priest, an aging diamond miner and his deaf-mute daughter - are forced to flee for their lives into the jungle. Starving, exhausted and stripped of their old identities, they wander desperately lured by one deceptive promise of salvation after another.