Catherine Rascon

Using their bare hands, married couple Htwe Tin and Thein Shwe draw oil from a pit they drilled themselves on the land next to their house. There are lots of these “artisanal” oilfields dotted around Myanmar, where people have swapped crop cultivation for selling the oil they pump from the ground by hand.

A road trip, over ten years, across the so-called Amexican border, a mythical boundary, both physical and cultural, that separates the United States of America from the United Mexican States; a journey in search of the multiple stories of those who inhabit it or are passing through: an audacious expedition that aims to paint a colorful fresco where politics, violence, visual poetry and frustrated ambitions cruelly coexist.

The adventures of three female wanderers on their journeys thorough the United States of America, who hop on freight trains to travel free. The particular reasons of each one of them for living this life of perpetual motion are unique, a life that gains sense in the wide open empty space of an immense country, historically marked by the mythical rail roads.

In Gansu Province, northwest China, lie the remains of countless prisoners abandoned in the Gobi Desert sixty years ago. Designated as ultra-rightists in the Communist Party’s Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957, they starved to death in the reeducation camps. The film invites us to meet the survivors of the camps to find out firsthand who these persons were, the hardships they were forced to endure and what became their destiny.

At the end of the road lies a track, the very last, a track swamped with the mud of a Siberian autumn, and at the end of this track lies a vast, dark forest which secretes those who have made this their final refuge, in hamlets that fray a little more with every passing day, sapped by misery and alcohol. We have to travel as far as we can, and be prepared to fall into the ditch, to see what makes us human.

The mother left Chile 26 years ago, her two children did not see her again. The children have grown up : the brother a film-maker, the daughter a librarian. They will try to fix, to give a body to the telephonic voice of their mother, to finish the spell of the family's phantom limb.

About the Chinese drivers who transport coal from the coal fields to the buyers.

The challenge of the "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" set up by Nelson Mandela in South Africa is to achieve a truly democratic society. Composed of 17 members and Desmond Tutu, this Commission will be relayed throughout the country by groups called "Khulumani" (literally: "Free the Word"). For a little over a year, it will invite victims, perpetrators and witnesses of apartheid to tell the truth about the past. The filmmakers have been authorized to follow this incredible process, which should lead to the re-founding of the nation, for its entire duration. The film focuses on the collective character of the Commission, crossed by ethical, political and philosophical questions, as well as on a few characters, victims and executioners, linked by a common history. They are filmed in their interrogations and their steps to re-establish a link between a past and a possible future.