Happy Birthday to the National Front! For a long time, driven by the need to establish a dialogue around the Algerian War, René Vautier recorded the testimonies of Algerian independence activists, French conscripts and reservists, generals of the French army, historians... Thus, Mohamed Moulay, Ali Rouchaï, Mohamed Loulli, Germaine Tillion, Paul Teitgen, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Colonel Antoine Argoud, General de Bollardière, and General Jacques Massu, among others, gave their testimony before Vautier’s camera. A documentary long unseen that reminds us where the National Front comes from, which changed its name and gained some respectability after Jean-Marie Le Pen’s leadership. Warning: The film is a rescued copy. The technical quality is degraded, but that is only a detail... The Man with Bloody Hands (by René Vautier) I had embarked on a historical project: recording on video tapes the “memories” of witnesses of the Algerian War, so that one day young students from France and Algeria could write together, in images, a common history of the relations between the two peoples. I was told about a man, in Saint-Eugène, who, despite having been tortured, had trouble asserting his pension rights because he had never been a member of the FLN. I interviewed him somewhat by chance: he told me about his tortures, and how, between sessions of “gégène” (electric torture) and “bathtub” (immersion torture), his torturers had pushed his thumbs into his eye sockets: “as if they wanted to make my eyes pop out.” Then I did what I always did: showed him a series of photos of paratrooper officers, to ask if he recognized his torturers. Very dignifiedly, he told me he could no longer see... but he added: “I have a paper from Mr. Mayor (the mayor of Algiers at the time was Jacques Chevalier, former Minister of Defense under Mendès-France) where the name of the paratrooper lieutenant is written.” That’s how I saw that the name he couldn’t read — he had gone blind due to the tortures — was that of Lieutenant Le Pen. I had Jacques Chevalier’s signature authenticated by his family members and people who had worked with him; I checked documents from the time — there was no doubt. Apparently, there is a law in France forbidding the use of testimonies about atrocities committed during the Algerian War. Let’s not be ridiculous: Austrians are suspected of putting at the head of their republic a man accused of having “covered up” tortures, and yet we should hide from the French documents that the whole world will feast on during the presidential elections? Because no law can prevent the whole world — except France! — from knowing that we will have a candidate not only with delirious statements but with bloody hands. This article was published in L’Humanité on September 29, 1987.
genocidio
9 Archival description results for genocidio
ES ES-OVNI RSC-4356
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1988
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ES ES-OVNI RSC-1331
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2003
Part of Non-Identified Video Observatory (OVNI)
Civilian casualties continue to mount long after wars “officially” end. I shot these video images of preserved fetuses and living children in a Vietnamese hospital in 1991. Medical professionals believe that the continuing high percentage of birth defects in Vietnam is a direct consequence of the US use of Agent Orange from 1961 to 1971. Depleted uranium weapons used in Iraq in 1991 are now linked to similar birth defects, both in Iraqi children as well as in babies born to soldiers serving in the Gulf War.
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ES ES-OVNI RSC-4289
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2022
Part of Non-Identified Video Observatory (OVNI)
In military terminology, inner lines are escape routes which are located near opposing lines. They provide a way of passing undetected and fleeing. Around Mount Ararat, in Turkey and Armenia, messengers and their carrier pigeons travel along these parallel paths to meet up with communities in the grip of war. During their wanderings, they encounter Yezidis who have fled from the atrocities committed by Daesh and found refuge in transit camps in Turkey. They stand beside the last living survivors of the Armenian genocide. They travel around war-torn Nagorno-Karabakh, to accompany and support the bereaved families there. Throughout the story, men and women bear witness to what they have endured, to their shattered lives, to life, fighting off death. Above all, their words tell a tale of violence inflicted by men on other men, a violence that seems everlasting and obstinate.
ES ES-OVNI RSC-4339
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1956
Part of Non-Identified Video Observatory (OVNI)
When independence came, the owners of the big boats decided to sell up, so many small-scale fishermen soon found themselves out of work. Their wives decided to pool their gold rings and sell them to buy new boats.
ES ES-OVNI RSC-4290
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2017
Part of Non-Identified Video Observatory (OVNI)
Those who suffer from the melancholy of eternity are called eternals. Convinced that death cannot take their lives, they believe they are condemned to wander around waiting for the day when they will be released from their existence. This film is a tale of wanderings and escapes, on the borders of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan. Inhabited by the ghosts of the genocide and by the war that has been raging there for more than twenty years, the characters who traverse this film carry within them the melancholy of the eternal.
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ES ES-OVNI RSC-4298
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2018
Part of Non-Identified Video Observatory (OVNI)
In a city destroyed by war, while society tries to come to terms with the consequences of extreme violence, a little girl finds a peculiar way to survive.
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ES ES-OVNI CTX-S008-SS004-0002
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1999
Part of Non-Identified Video Observatory (OVNI)
Monument Valley uses archival images from various sources, images related to the famous south-western USA landscape and tourist attraction, tourists and fragments from classic Western films. This video blurs the boundaries between past and present.
ES ES-OVNI EXP-S004
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2022
Part of Non-Identified Video Observatory (OVNI)
Practical information
A presentation of Kurdish films by the Rojava Kurdistan Film Commune (Northern Syria)
OVNI has collaborated with the Rojava Film Commune in a project aimed at researching, screening, and promoting their work in Spain, Italy, and France. A process of investigation through videos, texts, and meetings, in order to listen to their voices and understand their struggle together. We have created a website that you can visit link.
Komîna fîlm a Rojava (Rojava Film Commune) is a collective of filmmakers founded in 2015, based in the autonomous Rojava region in the Federation of Northern and Eastern Syria. The Commune is actively working in the region to rebuild and reorganise filmmaking and film education infrastructures.
The Rojava Film Commune was established to promote local film culture by organising film screenings, facilitating discussions on the role of film within society, producing new films, and setting up a Film Academy. Following the 1960 fire in Rojava’s only cinema in the city of Amude—which saw the death of 298 children trapped inside—the Commune aims to reclaim film as a central space for reimagining society, by democratising and revolutionising the imagination itself.
The Commune has educated a new generation of Rojava filmmakers, organized screenings in cities and villages, and produced new films. It seeks to represent the values and ideals of the Rojava Revolution, but also to mediate and depict the daily struggles in the Syrian civil war and Rojava’s collective attempt to build a new society.
The Rojava Film Academy provides education for aspiring filmmakers in Northern Syria. Founded in 2015, it offers one-year programmes, with courses on international film history, Kurdish film history, film theory, photography, cinematography, script writing, editing, and sound design, taught by local and international film professionals.
The Academy is self-organized and non-hierarchical, encouraging students to participate in every aspect of its organization. Exchange networks have also been set up with other academic, media, and news platforms, and with civil society organizations, in order to engage in broad discussions and create screening possibilities. Considering the influx of foreign filmmakers and journalists to Rojava, it is important for the Commune to reclaim the representation and imagination of the revolution.
After decades of oppression of Kurdish language and culture, the Rojava Film Academy aims to revitalize local film culture, reclaiming the power to narrate and imagine one’s dreams and realities. After the Syrian Civil War started, the predominantly Kurdish northern region declared the Autonomy Administration, creating structures based on grassroots democracy, women’s liberation, and cultural diversity.
The Academy bases its methodology on ‘revolutionary realism’, i.e. a realism that does not merely reveal the current reality in a new way, but also restructures the reality of the possible . As well as finding forms to express things as-they-are, it creates the opportunity to imagine the not-yet-present, the ‘eternal becoming’ that is the revolution itself.
ES ES-OVNI EXP-S009
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2023
Part of Non-Identified Video Observatory (OVNI)
The Purple Meridians III
The Purple Meridians III
Over the past two years, a total of 19 filmmakers based in the three countries have met, online and in person, to discuss obstacles they face as women and non-binary people in the audiovisual industry, to exchange ideas and resources, and to create together.
Preparations are underway in Italy , Turkey , Catalonia and the Basque Country for the third edition of The Purple Meridians 2023 , with the Gender Equality sponsorship by Eurimages .
This year, the project will have its public and main event at the Durango Book-Music-Cinema Fair on 7 December . Durango is a city in the Basque Country and has been chosen by the organizers of The Purple Meridians to expand even further – as is the purpose of this project – the connections among women filmmakers in Europe and beyond.
The choice of the Basque Country was therefore a ‘natural’ development as Basque filmmakers followed the first two Purple Meridians albeit ‘from a distance’. The program in the Basque Country will be possible thanks to the collaboration with the Durango Book Fair and Suargi Elkartea.
Two main themes would be the focus of this third event:
the difficulties, responses, proposals for women in the audiovisual industry to conjugate work and care work (maternity, care of children, care of elderly, care of ill partner/family member etc) and for women with disabilities.
These two themes will be discussed in a 2-session conference in Durango to be held on 7 December 2023.
Two filmmakers directly and most affected by this situation will be leading the discussion, Lisa Çalan and Ahu Ozturk . The two filmmakers, both Kurdish, will work with Basque filmmakers (who are exploring these issues in their films and who this year will be presenting a manifesto about ‘care’), as well as with the other filmmakers of The Purple Meridians (from Italy and Catalonia), not only in exposing the problems, but also in proposing answers, keeping in mind that one of the pillars of The Purple Meridians project is creating networks among women filmmakers in different countries.
The speakers will be:
Lisa Çalan, Ahu Öztürk (from Turkey, TPM), internationally acclaimed Basque actress Itziar Ituño (La Casa de Papel), Basque directors Ainhoa Olaso (winner of the Aukera program) and Estibaliz Urresola (awarded in Berlin 2023), Catalan director Lara Vilanova (TPM), Italian director Claudia Tosi (TPM), Argentine scriptwriter based in Belfast Luciana de Mello , Lebanese director Mary Jirmanus Saba , Kurdish director Sevinaz Evdike (Women Filmmakers Collective Kezi), and director Elli (Post Collective - Buriatia, Greece, Syria, Belgium).
The day will be accompanied by the screening at Irudienea (12:30h-13:30h) of Estibaliz Urresola's short film, Cuerdas , and a Work in Progress by Mary Jirmanus Saba.
At 19:00 h, the filmmakers will present to the press a summary of the conference's work.
The press conference will feature also an intervention by a Palestinian filmmaker.