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. ?

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.

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.

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

Portrait of a woman and her disappearance.

This is the first compilation of films by Jean Painlevé, spanning his career from his beginnings as an actor to his work as a filmmaker in the leadup to WW1. In Methuselah, an avant-garde play by Ivan Goll, Painlevé is both actor and producer. This version includes a soundtrack added to the “film” – five sequences that were intended for projection during the play – in the eighties, when Painlevé discovered Maxime Jacob's original score for the play. The music was originally performed by The Republican Guard Band. Lacking the funds needed to engage this famous band, Painlevé chose to have a piano version recorded.