Une Jeunesse Allemande tells the history of the Rote Armee Fraktion (or Red Army Faction, a German revolutionary terrorist group from the 1970s founded notably by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof) as well as the images generated by this story. The film is entirely produced by editing preexisting visual and sound archives and aims to question viewers on the significance of this revolutionary movement during its time, as well as its resonance for today’s society. In the 1960s, the young democracy of West Germany was embarrassed by its Nazi past, and ingrown in its role as imperialist and capitalist outpost faced by its communist double. The postwar generation, in direct conflict with their fathers, was trying to find its place. The student movement exploded in 1966. The pas de deux between students and the government deteriorated, and radicalized those involved in a gradual escalation of violence and reprisals. From this seething youth emerged the journalist Ulrike Meinhof, filmmaker Holger Meins, students Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, as well as the lawyer Horst Mahler. When the student movement collapsed at the end of ’68, they remained isolated in their radicalism, and desperately sought ways to continue the revolutionary struggle. The RAF (Red Army Faction) was founded in 1970, its militants disappearing into hiding. Both the government and sympathizers appeared cautious. Initial RAF acts, along with police responses, involved a certain amount of improvisation. Then came 1972, and the irreparable break: in less than a week, the RAF committed five major attacks, resulting in many victims. The government reacted by taking a hardline stance in its conflict with the terrorist movement. Casualties grew on all sides, including the RAF (both outside and in prison), government (police officers but also politicians and officials), and especially anonymous civilians. Voices questioning both the political and moral implications of the RAF’s combat, as well as the federal government’s choice for total repression, were progressively drowned out. The autumn of ’77 marked the bloody finale to this story, which was also a war of images. The government refused to capitulate to the demands of both the RAF— which sought the release of its imprisoned members in exchange for Schleyer, the kidnapped president of the Employer Union—as well as the Palestinian commandos who, won over to the RAF cause, had hijacked a plane of German tourists. That same night, the plane was taken by storm at the Mogadishu airport, and the hostages were freed, while in Germany the final founding members of the RAF who were still alive “committed suicide” in prison, and Schleyer was killed by his abductors.
UntitledHemo is a musician who has embarked on a journey to Iran by train in order to have his old Persian string instrument repaired. The film accompanies him and his santoor, documenting the interesting, contradictory and entertaining reality of the stretch from Istanbul to Teheran. An interweaving of Hemo's impressions of his first trip to Iran with the opinions of his fellow travellers and the railway staff, as well as Iranian television propaganda. The result is a complex collage – highlighted with Anatolian santoor music – in which freedom, religion, travel and Iranian-Turkish stereotypes are made the central theme.
An unusual re-visitation of William Burroughs' text.
UntitledA l'heure de la politique show-biz, qu'est-ce qui peut pousser un journaliste à traiter de sujets complexes, denses, à refuser toute facilité ? Pourquoi accepte-t-il de risquer sa vie ? Jusqu'où accepte-t-il de la risquer ? Quelles implications cela a-t-il sur sa vie personnelle, familiale, amoureuse ? Témoin indésirable suit pas à pas le travail du journaliste colombien Hollman Morris, qui, à travers son émission de télévision Contravia, se bat pour dénoncer la barbarie du conflit qui frappe son pays.
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A woman tells the story of her life. Moments of profound loss and precious encounters, against the backdrop of her mother's death.
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Transit migration through the Sahara is a large-scale collective experience that is best understood, perhaps, in its systemic dimension. Highly adjustable, these movements have generated prolific operational networks, systems of information and social organization among fellow migrants as well as interaction with local populations. The long-term video research Sahara Chronicle (2006-2009) works with a notion of geography both as social practice and organizing system. The project is an open anthology of videos on the modalities of migration across the Sahara. It introduces the migration system as an arrangement of pivotal sites, each of which having a particular function in the striving for migratory autonomy, as well as in the attempts made by diverse authorities to contain and manage these movements. Sahara Chronicle involved field trips to the transit migration hubs in Agadez and Arlit in Niger, in the Libyan desert, on the Algero-Moroccan border; Mauritania and the Western Sahara as well as the harbor where clandestine boat passages leave from Senegal to the Canary Islands. Sahara Chronicle is part of the collaborative art and research project The Maghreb Connection - Movements of Life across Northern Africa.
UntitledEven though his musical and literary oeuvre is neither large nor very well known apart from his bestseller-novel «The Sheltering Sky», the American composer and author Paul Bowles (1910-1999) was a man of immense charisma and influence. When he moved to Tangier (Morocco) in 1949, it was a city divided into zones, a sanctuary for artists, writers and the wealthy to do as they pleased without fear of prosecution. Soon, Paul‘s friends and peers from America began visiting: Tennessee Williams,Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, William Burroughs and many others. The Neo-Lost Generation, the Beats, the Hippies all searched him out, lured by the mysterious and magical world he depicted in his books. But that was only one side. Though Paul Bowles never hid his homosexuality, he was married to the lesbian writer Jane Bowles. What attracted them despite their extremely different personalities was a shared worldview: that one must travel to the point of no return in order to find salvation. Based on an exclusive series of interviews with Bowles shortly before his death and anecdotes provided by his friends and collaborators, the film tells of a daring and visionary life and a relationship shaped by a codependency that went way beyond sexuality. Among the participants are Gore Vidal, Bernardo Bertolucci, John Waters, Ruth Fainlight, Edmund White, William Burroughs, Francis Bacon and many others.
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