Nora Philippe

Should Western museums return works of art and cultural artefacts to Africa? A film that poses the most pressing questions to the sharpest art historians from North and South.

From the 1840s until the 1940s, anonymous Afro-American women made rag dolls for their own children or for the white children they were looking after. Black, injured, forgotten and magnificent dolls, gathered together over the years in Debbie Neff’s collection, here lend their moving expressive features to the women that a century of slavery, segregation and racism tried to silence. Far from being the mute witnesses of their suffering, dreams and courage, these objects haunted by so many stories become, for the length of this film, the intermediaries of a discourse of self-affirmation and liberation. From Sojourner Truth to Maya Angelou,

This is the story of a team of 40 agents facing 4,000 job seekers at a job centre in the Parisian suburbs. Samia, Corinne, Thierry, Zuleika must support and monitor, bring in the numbers, obey policy guidelines and communication injunctions, and find job offers while none is to be found. Will their strong sense of humor save them from the Kafkaian world they work in?

At Uz, an isolated hamlet in the northern mountains of Portugal, four generations live together in a group of around fifty people. When life is rough, solidarity is of the highest order. Everything else is left in God’s hands. They could have emigrated, like so many others, but chose to stay and keep their ancestral way of life, away from the racket of modernity.

Neither a fiction nor a documentary, it is a film-dance. Not a narrative, but a journey through the Villeneuve area of Grenoble. No characters, but energies, encounters. The body of a dancer in the city. An essay of re-enchantment.

Anta, Evy, Lila and Talia were 20 in 2015 and studied at all-female Barnard College in New York. 2015 - 2045: 30 years and 3 films to see how they will shape the world from the inside out, becoming women on a fast changing planet.