Karaganda, Kazakhstan's second-largest city, located to the south of the steppes, was built in 1930 by displaced prisoners over a coalfield in the immense Karlag. Today, the basis of the city's economy is disappearing, leading to considerable impoverishment. « Mine de Rien » documents a time of instability, of transition between two states, feeling abandonment and capitalist hope. A state that has passed and a state which is just starting, intangible, inevitable. The film follows this transition, which generates chaos, adaptation and suffering, revealing the impossibility of being : at a time when human beings can no longer be considered as a mass, but a sum of individuals. En exploding population mapped over the geographical structure of the city.

This collaborative film, banned for more than a decade by French censors as an attack on French colonialism (and now available only in shortened form), is a deeply felt study of African art and the decline it underwent as a result of its contact with Western civilization. Marker's characteristically witty and thoughtful commentary is combined with images of a stark formal beauty in this passionate outcry against the fate of an art that was once integral to communal life but became debased as it fell victim to the demands of another culture.

One day they will do with reality what they? ve done with TV. You will only have the right to leave the house if you pay a 150 euro monthly fee. If you don?t pay up, everything you see will look blurry.

The birthday of this video's fictional filmmaker, Avi Mograbi (also the name of the real director), is the same day as the 50th jubilee anniversary of the founding of Israel, a day observed by Palestinians as "Al Nakba" or the Catastrophe. Mograbi is hired first by Israeli television to film the events leading up to the jubilee and then by a Palestinian producer who wants him to film the ruins of Palestinian villages and towns in Israel. To make matters worse, he is enmeshed in a real estate deal with his neighbours and enraged buyers arguing over property boundaries. The collision of these three anniversaries, two film jobs and a dispute over property lines takes this fictional "documentary" into the depths of Israeli and Palestinian daily life and a shared 50-year history.