A public square, a shared place, time, passers-by. The director stops there, for a year, to look at the small details amid the hubbub. He takes interest in the wind, the sounds of the night, and those who, like him, stop. These are encounters in which no words are exchanged, often presented in a single shot. Anonymous voiceovers tell stories of ephemeral encounters. A slowness, a stillness, which, by force, becomes action, distiling a singularly political regard on public space today.

'atlantis' shows a nocturnal landscape being scanned by a lightbeam. The searchlight of a boat on the Chinese Yangtze river explores the banks of the Three Gorges Reservoir, which came into existance due to the construction of the controversial Three Gorges Dam. Just before it would flood up to its final level of 175m this lightbeam reveals what soon is going to disappear below water level. Referring to the concentrated lightbeams in typical images of underwater discoveries and explorations, this video seems to explore a sunken universe, a land of which people seem to have left, with demolished and abandoned buildings, desolate forests and ghost ships.

I've known Sarah and Julie for many Years. Sarah was a very close friend during adolescence, and I shared most of may childhood with Julie. Some years later I found them both working in professions that required taking care of others : Sarah as a psychologist in palliative care and Julie as a teacher in a school for children with difficulties. It's because I knew something of their history that I wanted to ask them what lead them to these professions they carry out as much for others as for themselves.

The extraordinary and tragic saga of 267 congolese, brought to Brussels for the 1897 World’s Fair. After some four months of travel towards Belgium, they are exhibited before a million visitors. Subjected to the crushing gaze of the "whites" and the cold climate many fall prey to disease... some lose their lives. The dead were hastily dispatched in a common grave, sparking a fierce debate in Belgian society. The project was overblown, but necessary in the eyes of the first colonisers, who presumed to have tamed the far-flung savages... One hundred years later, Congolese compatriots return to the scene of these events and question the "whites" of today on the incredible story of that "human zoo". They carry out the ritual of "a return to the earth" by way of reparation for too great a hurt... A film that revisits a century of stereotyped conceptions about the Africans. And running through it, the almost aching question : "How is today different ?"

From the compilation "bwana matali", this chapter "to domain in order to serve" is focused in the advent of the colonial power into the tribal net of Congo, as well as in the development of its "colonial utopia" contrasted with the reality of a economical domination, in which this utopia is shown as a simple excuse for the complete exploitation of the natural and human resources, and the its "decorative" humanism is always blocked by the sectarian interests of the white minority elite.

There is André Cauvin's most famous film Bwana Kitoko, a gripping account of King Baudouin's first journey to the black continent in 1955. Five years later Congo was independent.