Julie Frères

Um jovem homem, preso num quarto em algum lugar da Inglaterra, observa o mundo exterior pela internet, livre para mover-se além de fronteiras. Conversas, textos, ligações com sua mãe, assim como questionários do escritório de imigração juntam a sua história: uma viagem do Iran para Turquia, para a Grécia e eventualmente até o Reino Unido, onde busca o asilo.

Claire Simon goes to Lussas, in France’s Ardèche, home to a vibrant community of documentarians. She films the creation of Tënk, an online platform for auteur documentaries. The initiative is a labour of love for the passionate and optimistic people behind it, but the process is long and arduous, as cultural projects often are. The filmmaker followed them for months, capturing their doubts and dilemmas: how do you manage everyday conflicts? Be accepted by a rural population that you aren’t part of? By the general public? Reconcile private life and professional calling? Reassure the mayor? Secure funding without making ethical compromises? A fascinating, bittersweet and insightful behind-the-scenes film. (Apolline Caron-Ottavi)

Vanya, Sasha and Denis are in their thirties, they grew up together in Kyiv’s northern suburbs. This winter, their murky past dissolves, leaving them without any bearings. They should probably start building their future… or keep on breathing the blazing freedom of the present.

A film crew crisscrosses England trying to unravel the mystery surrounding a record released 30 years earlier, 'Spirit of Eden', that defined the passage from light to shadow of its makers, the band Talk Talk and its lead singer Mark Hollis. From overwhelming obstacles to unpredictable encounters, their journey soon turns into an organic quest. With silence as a horizon line. And punk as a philosophy, thinking that music is accessible to all and that the human spirit is above the technique.

This film is an African “Boyhood” that gives an insight to the political and historical situation of Burundi throughout the last 24 years through the eyes of six street children that now have become adults.

Lou Colpé has been filming her grandparents since she was 15. In the process of this intense relationship, she notices some disconcerting signs in her grandmother: Alzheimer’s is slowing her down. A new film begins, a tougher one: the story of a couple that must face a tremendous challenge. Struggling against the tide of oblivion, the task of filmmaking becomes the ultimate act of resistance. Trying to retain the last images of her grandparents, an intimate conversation begins and echoes through the songs that play on the radio, conjuring lost stories and memories.

Laosan, a young family man, spends all his time smoking opium. For his community, lost in the heart of the Laotian jungle, opium farming is the only way to survive. But opium is also the poison that puts men to sleep and kills their desires.

The Amazon flows lazily through the goldmine-gashed landscape of northern Peru. Using real eyewitness accounts, directors Bénédicte Liénard and Mary Jiménez tell the story of a young woman who winds up in the clutches of forced prostitution when her initially hopeful attempt to escape the constrictions of her village goes wrong. Step by step, she is robbed of her moral and physical integrity. The film reconstitutes a space of dignity and returns voice and identity to a fate formally made nameless. With its powerful imagery, the girl’s traumatic odyssey embodies the destruction of life in a capitalist world in connection with horrific natural devastation.

Everyone calls him Kev, this pale-looking redhead, who a social worker found, as a child, locked in a bedroom where he had only rays of sunshine to play with. Now a teenager, Kevin suffers from a form of autism so severe that the majority of so-called specialised institutions have long refused to take him in. Clémence Hébert followed him with her camera, from one place to another. She, who is gifted with speech and he, who lives without, tamed each other as peers with a lens as the only medium of recognition, which captures what palpitates, appears, withers, and recommences. A discontinued but living link.

Today, as a skipper for bulgarian tourists, Nikolay recalls the dream he accomplished in 1985 : going around the world by himself. In crossing the iron curtain, he has shown the way to freedom to an entire generation of young Bulgarians.

The film Announcements paints the portraits of seven women reflecting on the same theme. Their starting point is the announcement to Hagar, Sarah and Mary as in the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Koran. Their thoughts spread out and weave a new web, drawing strands from their associations and interpretations of these texts. And by talking about their own history, their personal myths, they work up to subjects such as the birth of image in the Christian world or that of poetry in ancient Greece. Announcements is a film about the movement of thought, the power of words, the secret of the voice, and the seduction of the image.