"I traveled across Mauritania to find a tree that I saw from my window in Belgium. It wasn't a mythical tree, but rather one that could be anywhere. On my way, I met men and women who shared their perception of this quest and in doing so, in a roundabout way they shared some of their visions of the world and existence. For some, my tree was the sign from the spirits, of the invisible or a call from light. For others, it was the symbol of a history, a culture or the end of a period in time. For yet others, it was a tree that you see only when you get lost".

“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.

"In 1996, I was staying in the village of Mankien in South Sudan to film the war which was taking place. At the time, I thought that making a film about an area struggling with such a severe conflict would almost have to be an act of duty. Once there, the reality appeared completely different from what I initially imagined it would be. The war that was all around me was not only a struggle between an oppressive government and a downtrodden minority but a latent conflict driven by power and economic interests. Back in Belgium, I felt overwhelmed by a strong feeling of helplessness and disillusionment to the point of never showing these images, up to now. A short while ago, I was told that the village of Mankien had been subjected to a massacre orchestrated by the Khartoum government with more than the slight complicity of Western oil companies. Closed District is not only a film about the war in South Sudan, but more about wars in general, about the death and distress that often ensues. It also raises the question of the filmmaker's place in a situation of conflict". (Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd)