An exploration of human sentiments, but also a questioning of the reality of these feelings once they are filtered through the media. 6th Independent Vídeo & Interactive Phenomena Show

Stranger than fiction... In 1998, seven years after the independence of the country, the autocratic Kazahk president Noursoultan Nazarbaiev decides to move the capital city Almaty to Astana, in the northern steppes. Vertiginous towers spring out of the ground, financed by oil exports. The film opens with a presidential speech in 1997 on the future of Kazakhstan, boasting to “the three layers of society, the rich, the middle class and the poor” of the infinite promise of the free market. Christian Barani and Guillaume Reynard observe the life of a new society, in the standardised and gaudy trappings of wealth. Through an ex-Soviet oligarchy in full expansion, a melancholy and poetic portrait of globalization.

The life story of an elderly Mauritanian woman, Aïcha Messaoud, who spent her whole life as part of Sheik Ma-el-Aïnïne's distinguished family of nomads and now lives in the small Moroccan village of Tata, in the northern part of Western Sahara. The filmmaker sets out to trace the memories of her heroine. Stage after stage, she travels through thousands of kilometres across the desert, encountering the descendants of the Sheik.

On November 1, 1954, two French teachers and an Algerian Muslim leader fall victim to a mortar attack near the small Chaoui village of Ghassira. This event marks the start of the Argelian independence war. Fifty years later, Malek Bensmaïl takes his camera into this region considered “the cradle of the revolution” and questions its inhabitants about their relationship to its history and language and to France. Today's students bear witness to a different age, the contemporary Argelia that can be glimpsed between acceptance and rebellion. Between memory, the present and the future. November 1, 1954 near Ghassira, a small village nestled in the Aurès mountains. Two French teachers and an Algerian notable are the first civil victims of a war that will last for seven years and eventually lead to Algerian independence. More than fifty years later, Malek Bensmail returns to this village, which became "the cradle of the Algerian revolution," to film this chronicle of it and its inhabitants throughout the seasons, capturing the present and the past. The Algerian heartlands, larger than life, rich, poignant, confronted with its future. ?

We are now moving through a very bleak period in human history - where the convergence of postmodernist cynicism (eliminating humanistic and critical thinking from the education system), sheer greed engendered by the consumer society sweeping many people under its wing, human, economic and environmental catastrophe in the form of globalisation, massively increased suffering and exploitation of the people of the so-called Third World, as well as the mind-numbing conformity and standardization caused by the systematic audiovisualization of the planet have synergistically created a world where ethics, morality, human collectivity, and commitment (except to opportunism) are considered old fashioned. Where excess and economic exploitation have become the norm - to be taught even to children. In such a world as this, what happened in Paris in the spring of 1871 represented (and still represents) the idea of commitment to a struggle for a better world, and of the need for some form of collective social Utopia - which WE now need as desperately as dying people need plasma. The notion of a film showing this commitment was thus born.

We are now moving through a very bleak period in human history - where the convergence of postmodernist cynicism (eliminating humanistic and critical thinking from the education system), sheer greed engendered by the consumer society sweeping many people under its wing, human, economic and environmental catastrophe in the form of globalisation, massively increased suffering and exploitation of the people of the so-called Third World, as well as the mind-numbing conformity and standardization caused by the systematic audiovisualization of the planet have synergistically created a world where ethics, morality, human collectivity, and commitment (except to opportunism) are considered old fashioned. Where excess and economic exploitation have become the norm - to be taught even to children. In such a world as this, what happened in Paris in the spring of 1871 represented (and still represents) the idea of commitment to a struggle for a better world, and of the need for some form of collective social Utopia - which WE now need as desperately as dying people need plasma. The notion of a film showing this commitment was thus born.

We are now moving through a very bleak period in human history - where the convergence of postmodernist cynicism (eliminating humanistic and critical thinking from the education system), sheer greed engendered by the consumer society sweeping many people under its wing, human, economic and environmental catastrophe in the form of globalisation, massively increased suffering and exploitation of the people of the so-called Third World, as well as the mind-numbing conformity and standardization caused by the systematic audiovisualization of the planet have synergistically created a world where ethics, morality, human collectivity, and commitment (except to opportunism) are considered old fashioned. Where excess and economic exploitation have become the norm - to be taught even to children. In such a world as this, what happened in Paris in the spring of 1871 represented (and still represents) the idea of commitment to a struggle for a better world, and of the need for some form of collective social Utopia - which WE now need as desperately as dying people need plasma. The notion of a film showing this commitment was thus born.