Intermezzo Films

The Gangbé Brass Band, a musical group from Benin, sets out to conquer Lagos, capital of Nigeria.

17-year old Sarah, filled with adolescent angst, is an extreme person who in her rehearsals with a theatre group is transformed until she is almost in a trance, and her performances at home or elsewhere verge on excess. A cold, intellectual father, a timid mother, a younger sister and an older brother who has left home complete the picture: a silent time bomb.

Carlos’ American dream is trapped in the labyrinth of the U.S. administration which refuses to legally recognise him. He arrived from Mexico as a child, yet he has been living in Chicago for 29 years.

Jules Guarneri grew up in Villars, with two adopted siblings, in a chalet haunted by the ghost of his mother who died when he was 20, and where his solitary father still lives; the latter presents him one day with his filmed diary. A cumbersome gift that the “filmographer” uses to make it resonate with his own images, thus forging his own emancipating path towards adulthood.

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb…Daesh…Boko Haram.** So many extremist movements, of which Africa has become a breeding ground, have declared war against Western values and people. Beyond the misunderstandings that often paralyze us, we have to ask ourselves the real question: **how did we get here?** Filmed in Mali, *RETURN TO BAMAKO* is a deep dive into the land of Islam, seeking to understand the causes and challenges of the threat posed by the rise of radical Islamism to all societies. The Islamist wave did not come about accidentally, but instead is the result of recent history, of which Westerners are the actors, because in the vast majority of cases, it is the failure of a political and economic system, copied or imposed by the West, along with unbridled globalization, which opens a gaping hole and allows the rise of extremism.