Hiroshima 1914-2006

“This world is unfair. Its organization is inhuman. We know it. It shows. All the time. I don't want to denounce it. I'm seeking something else”. Through meetings in Limoges and in La Rochelle, images and sounds gleaned here or there, a search for what squatting is and what it can be, the alternatives, and through it all, utopia.

The night crossing of a Mediterranean city by car. Its passenger stay there almost invisible, absorbed by the urban view. A voice confirms a lonely night wandering in a city by the sea, an urban journey made to let the time pass away. Who crosses this city isn't only passing through it. He's a local, for a night, before an exile without return.

Traditionally considered a postmodern city, Dubai is actually a confrontation between two ways of life. The most densely populated part of the city lives in what could be considered a “modern” architecture and society. The other and more widely known part is based along the lines of the postmodern philosophy that Jeremy Rifkin has described so well.

Cassius Clay is the world champion. 1967. The Vietnam war. Ali refuses to enlist.

To find, 20 years later, the boy with whom he was kissed for the first time, the author, now unrecognizable for him, manages to put him in front of a camera with a "professional" pretext ...

Treichville is a poor suburb of Abidjah, the capital of Ivory Coast and the destination of the two protagonists in this docudrama by Jean Rouch. The two men in question are originally from Nigeria, and they call themselves Eddie Constantine and Edward G. Robinson, clear indications of who their heroes are. The perpetual conflict between traditional ways of life and new Western imports comes up several times as the two men continue on their daily rounds and reveal a little about their hopes for the future.

Karaganda, Kazakhstan's second-largest city, located to the south of the steppes, was built in 1930 by displaced prisoners over a coalfield in the immense Karlag. Today, the basis of the city's economy is disappearing, leading to considerable impoverishment. « Mine de Rien » documents a time of instability, of transition between two states, feeling abandonment and capitalist hope. A state that has passed and a state which is just starting, intangible, inevitable. The film follows this transition, which generates chaos, adaptation and suffering, revealing the impossibility of being : at a time when human beings can no longer be considered as a mass, but a sum of individuals. En exploding population mapped over the geographical structure of the city.

Over the last twenty five years, Maghrebian immigrants living in France have brought their families to join them. Many of them lived in shanty towns before moving to working class suburbs. Their children were sent to school and grew up in France. Now their grandchildren cannot move forward, because they have lost their historical memory. This community of two million people, of whom a third have French nationality, are weighted down by double silence: the silence of their parents, and the silence of the public institutions. Mémoires d'immigrés, l'héritage maghrébin is an inside look at this community scattered throughout the four corners of French territory. Benguigui constructs her documentary by intercutting the personal and moving stories of three groups of interviewees: the fathers, the mothers, and the children.

Yamina Benguigui turns her camera on a multi-ethnic region on the outskirts of Paris. These 'backyards' of Paris - suburban industrial ghettos filled with poor immigrants - are a breeding ground for social problems in the midst of an eclectic mix of conflicting cultures and identities.