Momento!

Composed exclusively of the footage recorded by Leo Hurwitz during the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, A Specialist is a courtroom drama painting the portait of a zealous bureaucrat who has immense respect for the Law and hierarchy, a police official responsible for the elimination of several million people, a modern criminal.

The genocide in Rwanda (Itsembatsemba) took place amongst general indifference. On the 6th April 1994, a fury of purification swept the country. Within one hundred days, soldiers and militiamen (interhamwe) massacred at least 700,000 Tutsis. These images were taken two years after the genocide, in April 1996. The sound track comes from Radio Télévision Libre Mille Collines (Thousand Hills Free Broadcasting)–RTLM–and dates from April to June 1994. RTLM began to transmit in 1991 with the help of the regime and played a key role in the unleashing and the coordination of the killing.

Burundi, 21st October 1993: The Democratically elected President Ndadaye is assassinated by a group of Tutsi officers. Another round of reprisals and counterattacks begins under pressure from the militia and extremist parties who encourage the racial hostilities and fan the flames of terror. There is one pogram after another, with tens of thousands of people becoming refugees in their own country.

Aqabat-Jaber is one of the sixty Palestinian refugee camps built in the Middle East by the UN at the beginning of the 1950s. Filmed in 1987, a few months before the Intifada, this film tells the story of a disinherited generation brought up in the nostalgia of places they never knew and which no longer exist. The story of a temporary solution that became a permanent way of life.

Nabila Djahnine, president of the feminist association Thirghri N'tmetout, died in hands of an armed group in Tizi Ouzou (Algeria) in 1995. The Islamists forced women, on pain of death, to wear the hijab or stop working. It was the first time a feminist woman paid with her life. Nabila wrote a letter to her sister Habiba in 1994. This documentary is her answer. In 2006 Habiba comes back to the place to restore her sister’s memory, her point of view, the day of her death and the political moment Algeria was going through at that time.