Fair trading is very much in fashion today. The idea is to help the most underprivileged populations on our planet to emerge from this state thanks to a fairer distribution of revenue. Shea butter is increasingly appreciated in Europe, where it is used in the cosmetic industry and as a cocoa substitute. In sharing the lives of Shea butter producers in Burkina Faso, the film carries us to the heart of the problems of survival in Africa.

“Le cercle des noyés” (The circle of the drowned men) is the name given to a group of black political prisoners in Mauritania who were arrested in 1986 and incarcerated in the city of Oulata's former Colonial Fort. The documentary follows the subtle mental process of one of the ex-prisoners as he remembers his own story and that of his fellow prisoners. Like an echo, we see a series of images of the sites of their confinement – bare, stripped of all traces of this past.

'the core' deals with a small trouble-filled place where two characters finally leave their isolation. in the course of a literary voice-over by Lucian, the viewer is moved by the dim, unsettling sensations brought about by the depiction of a landslide in an anonymous working camp. everything seemed to be colored by clankling noise and beam filled with smoke. thoughts and words were forced to be mute. yet there was nothing to understand pure pain when the earth put into chaos opened and closed from inside, resembling an endless childhood : it continues to open and close. in fact the dust-swamped image introduces a fusion between fiction and reality while fiction generates the reality which still remains in search for humanity. it is the aftermath of dreamlike scenes, as it is the result of breaking desires. therefore one can gather the stream of humiliated and invaded beauty that is incarnated by the actors as a temptation to concieve the being for new reasons to experience and express love.

In the early 1960s, in Salisbury (present-day Harare), in Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), the government of Ian Smith hanged three black revolutionaries who had been pardoned by the Queen of England. René Vautier, together with ZAPU (Zimbabwe African Party for Unity), denounced the assassination. Expelled by the Rhodesian police (who had received information from the French secret services), the filmmaker went to Algeria to shoot a film in the form of an allegation against colonial savagery. The film was initially banned in France, but was authorized in 1970, it seems that in England it was never authorized. A poem written by René Vautier (under the Algerian pseudonym Férid Dendeni), read by the future Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty, paintings by the South African painter Gerard Sekoto, a soundtrack donated by members of the Black Panthers exiled in Algiers (a slow funeral march composed to accompany the funeral of a black man killed during the struggle for civil rights in the United States), masks and statuettes of black art. Unable to make his usual live-action film, Vautier improvised a magnificent filmic poem.

collection Petites Planètes. ‘Jihad’ is a fundamental Arab concept. In these times of conflict and violence, we only hear the mass media version – the extreme meaning of the term, which has strayed from its original sense – while its deeper meaning is ignored. Jihad can be translated as effort, commitment, and struggle in the broad sense. It is a concept and an experience with two different levels, one subordinate to the other. On one hand there is the ‘small jihad’ which has to do with effort, with the communal struggle to attain a society that is fairer and more aware of the mystery of reality (Al-Haqq) and of life (Al Hayy), which are two of the names of Allah. And the other is the ‘great jihad’, which is considered more important, and which determines whether the success, failure, or digression of the small jihad. This great struggle is the inner quest, the effort to cleanse everything inside us that distances mankind from the real... everything that favours a world made up of separate, selfish entities, a world that is closed, appropriable, and doomed to conflict. One of the most beautiful and profoundly meaningful practices of the great jihad is the ritual ceremony of ‘dhikr’ (zikr), an Arabic word that means memory... and in this context refers specifically to the memory of Allah... a personal reencounter - within a collective ceremony - with the mystery of the Real... in other words, with that which is cannot be defined, represented, or appropriated... that which is beyond physical or rational measure. According to this tradition, only one organ is capable of accommodating such an immensity: the human heart. Sufism struggles to remain within the heart of Islam. And in suffering Chechnya, Sufism is the most widespread form of Islam. Vincent Moon and Bulat Khalylov recorded a beautiful, immersive form of the experience of this dhikr ceremony.