Le Cercle des noyés is the name given in Mauritania to black political prisoners imprisoned from 1987 in the old colonial fortress of Oualata. This film touches on the fragile process of unveiling memories by one of these former prisoners who remembers his story and that of his companions. In a visual echo, the places of their confinement come one after another denuded from any traces of that past.
From Belgium, Jialai Wang maintains contact via smartphone and camera with her mother and grandmother in China. When her grandmother’s health deteriorates, Jialai returns to Shanghai, but when she arrives, her grandmother has already died, and she is left alone with her mother. A devout Buddhist, her mother seems to pay more attention to her daily prayers, Maoist past and dog Dongdong than she does to her daughter. She herself had been abandoned as a child by her own mother, when she divorced Jialai’s grandfather and moved to the city.
Juan, the film director, is Ecuadorian, his partner, Francisca, is Cuban. They live in Paris where their two children were born, just like Juan 30 years earlier. By switching back and forward from past to present, between the history of a family across 3 generations and that of a whole continent, the film director considers the issue of political commitment and the heritage left to the next generation in the form of a letter from a father to his children.
When I got to Rignano, the Ghetto residents told me: "You mustn't keep any trace of our lives here in these precarious houses. This despair is not yours to display." The misery in the Ghetto is the first thing that struck me, the first thing I wanted to show.
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.
Documentary about the war in South Sudan.
Mittimatalik, community of 1300 inhabitants, located 6 ° from the Arctic Circle in the Canadian Far North. The temperature is only positive there for two months a year. This is where the directors have chosen to put their camera down to explore the influence of an extreme environment on the mental universe and to try to understand how this environment is reflected in the imagination. The film, at the same time poetic and anthropological, listens to the accounts of the inhabitants' dreams, which it confronts with the daily gestures and life of the village, a life naked to the immensity of a natural world beyond the human environment everywhere.
Documentary about what makes a house a home.
