This Little Father Obsession
A kaleidoscopic family film blending documentary and auto-fiction, This Little Father Obsession sees the complexity of Lebanese society confronted with the personal aspirations of an individual, and the weight of patriarchal tradition with the desire for emancipation. The filmmaker traces the portrait of a family in which he is trying to find his place. The last descendant, losing his fertility, attracted to men, he is wondering about filiations and confronts his father with his obsessions at a time when their family house in Beirut is waiting to be demolished. Truth unveils as they go on a quest together to find a forgotten relative. During this journey, the house seems to persist.
Bloody Beans (Loubia Hamra)
17 kids, relentless and insatiable in their gestures and screams, set everything on fire. They become grand heroes of an unwritten war; while the French Army fires at the OAS, the children loot the French Army: oil, chocolate, semolina, sugar, and even a war prisoner condemned to eat beans. But the war catches up with the beautiful adventure, and the beans are marred in blood.
Through the transgressive and powerful imagination of children, the movie depicts the end of French Algeria.
Inland
Living almost as a recluse, hiding from the world and its violence, Malek, a topographer in his thirties accepts a job in a region of western Algeria. The Oran research department, for whom he had just started working, puts him in charge of setting up a new power line that will run through the impoverished and hemmed-in villages of the Ouarsenis Mountains, a zone terrorized by religious extremism for about 10 years now.
Beats of The Antonov
Sudan has been in an almost constant state of civil war since it achieved independence in 1956, and it split into a pair of sovereign states in 2011. On the border between the two, Russian-made Antonov planes indiscriminately drop bombs on settlements in the Nuba Mountains below. Yet, incredibly, the people of the Blue Nile respond to adversity with music, singing, and dancing to celebrate their survival.
Beats of the Antonov explores how music binds a community together, offering hope and a common identity for refugees engaged in a fierce battle to protect cultural traditions and heritage from those trying to obliterate them.
Winner, Grolsch People’s Choice Documentary Award, 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.
I Loved So Much (J’ai tant aimé)
“I wanted to live and love, like all modern women”, says Fadma who is now 75 years old. When she was young she was employed by the French Army as a prostitute and accompanied the soldiers in the war in Indochina. Far from being nostalgic or regretting her work, she presents herself in Dalila Ennadre’s intimate portrait as an open and extremely entertaining protagonist.
Today Fadma earns a living for herself and her adopted sons as a beggar and fights to be recognised by France as a war veteran. Her bubbling energy incites one to listen, sympathize, and learn more about the legacy of colonial Moroccan history.
Nūn Wa Zaytun
While listening to the stories of the people Murad meets with his Mobile Cinema, trekking from one venue to another, Nūn wa Zaytun transports us to another Palestine. We encounter a simple rural life, far from the cultural and social stereotypes of modern, urban Ramallah or Tel Aviv (built by the occupation on the ruins of the villages of the Palestinian city of Jaffa), only kilometers away.
Scattered communities come together for a moment to watch films shot in Palestine over 20 years, in which some even acted. This moment of communal harmony and artistic pleasure contrasts rudely with the bitter realities they face in coping with encroaching settlements, the attrition of ancestral land, and the daily brutalities of occupation and poverty.
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