A wolf cub takes advantage of when his mother leaves to hunt, to venture away from the protection of their den. But the unknown environment frightens him and he gets lost. After hiding in a garden, he is found by the children of a hunter who decide to take him home.
Four years after Algeria’s independence, Ahmed Lallem provides a stage for high school girls, from the first to the last year, to talk about their lives and the future of their country. Sarah Maldoror is an assistant director for this film.
An elegy for Sarah Maldoror’s lost film, Guns for Banta, from 1970. This accompanied a woman involved in the struggle for the independence of Guinea and Cape Verde. Financed by the Algerian army, the aim was to use it as propaganda, having been confiscated from Maldoror.
Bariloche is a mecca in Patagonia, Argentina, for those who want to ski. But the gaze of the film is interested in contrasting tourists and Argentines, happy for the chance to take advantage of the white slopes, and the indigenous population that works so that others can enjoy the winter sport. There is an implicit exclusion and the film inhabits this dichotomy.
Christophe Cognet visits World War II concentration and extermination camps, such as Ravensbrück, Dachau or Auschwitz-Birkenau, evoking the presence of people who went through them and tried, clandestinely, to photograph and document the horror they saw with their own eyes. This evocation is made through the photographs that Cognet was able to obtain, juxtaposing the images captured with the locations in their contemporaneity.
Ephraim Asili continues to explore the African diaspora, as well as his place and role in it. This marks his feature film debut with a meta-textual film, centered on a community of black artists and activists, in West Philadelphia, who want to create a collective. At the same time, it interweaves a remembrance of the MOVE liberation movement, bombed by the Philadelphia police in 1985.
Wanda Jakubowska is a Polish filmmaker known for her work on the Holocaust, herself a victim of it. This film, one of the earliest depictions of life in concentration camps, is a powerful testimony. Filmed in Auschwitz shortly after the end of the war, it portrays the experience of several women in this camp. A little-known film that is presented in a digital restoration that shows the film in a new light (and sound).
Effi & Amir (born in Israel, living in Brussels) are a pair of artists who’ve worked together for over 20 years. In By the Throat, they explore a specific idea: human discourse (seen and studied in multiple ways) and the way in which strange/foreign sounds are understood as different or alien, in the same way as distinct territories can be considered hostile or lead to the definition of borders.
This film started from a singular idea: to illustrate the phrase of the American director Raoul Walsh, who worked in the first half of the 20th century, which gives the film its title, by making a compilation of all the characters that ride horses in his films. But the film grows beyond the compilation film, or even the essay film, to become something bigger and more idiosyncratic, with a hint of a detective story.
The melting of permafrost is a matter of concern in the face of issues related to climate change. In this film, it is a portal for reality to shape itself with fiction, or even myth. Different characters scour the Siberian tundra in search of a rare reindeer or of viable cells from the extinct mammoth. During this odyssey, how do you know when hope becomes an obsession?
In a world where dinosaurs would have the necessary technology, including their own space exploration agency, to defeat their number one enemy – the asteroid – this could have been the result of this historic clash. Alas, their arms are a bit on the short side.
Everything makes sense now. God used a sort of Paint from Microsoft 1997 to draw a first draft of Earth, with dinosaurs, humans and spaceships. But the kids won’t let him concentrate, the angels won’t help out and it’s best if he just rethinks his strategy.
In two short minutes, we accompany an octopus that just wants the glass that surrounds his habitat to be completely and totally clean. To try and get the task accomplished, he uses all his arms to try to clean one missed spot.
Autumn arrives and the birds leave for warmer climates. Inspired by this migration, the little gray wolf yearns to fly and follow them. But who needs to know how to fly when a branch of a tree, friends and some imagination can have the same magic?
These dogs are angry. They bark when they see an apple, or a football, or a goldfish. But why are they so angry? A good-natured meditation on rabies, using a crude line to draw these scruffy canines.
It is through embroidery that this animation comes to life, if not wings. When the candy that two kids are enjoying is stolen by a cheeky bird, one of them comes forward to put on the hero’s cape and try to recover the lost treat.
Washing clothes, playing an instrument. Simple everyday gestures that are interrupted by the libidinous behavior of a washing machine.
Jack is Joaquim Calçada, a former aircraft mechanic. Before the Carnation Revolution, he emigrated to New York, where he became a taxi driver. He returns, as Carmen Miranda sang, “Americanized”, after twenty years. It’s in Alhandra, Vila Franca de Xira, that, one step away from retirement, he tells stories of his time in the United States and of a journey guided by his survival instinct.