l’atelier documentaire

A prison cell is set up in an empty room on the edge of Paris. Three former political prisoners from Iran re-enact how they were once interrogated and tortured. With quiet scepticism, the film asks whether their experiences can be accessed in this way.

Mojtaba, Hamzeh, Zar are among other individuals who have been thrown into prison and ideologically interrogated in Iran. In this documentary, the director wants them to interrogate him as agents of the Islamic Republic might. He would like the real torturer in Iran to see himself through the film as if in a mirror. The violent experience of putting themselves in the torturer's head confronts them with their own limits and the ambivalence of the project itself.

A handful of prisoners in WWII camps risked their lives to take clandestine photographs and document the hell the Nazis were hiding from the world. In the vestiges of the camps, director Christophe Cognet retraces the footsteps of these courageous men and women in a quest to unearth the circumstances and the stories behind their photographs, composing as such an archeology of images as acts of defiance.

1962, at the end of the Algerian War, Algerian independence activists are released from Rennes prison. For one night, filmmaker Yann Le Masson films them. They tell him their vision for the future of Algeria and the place women must occupy in the new society to be built. Fifty years later, with the soundtrack missing, Raphaël Pillosio sets out to find these women. Two deaf people set about lip-reading the women filmed by Yann Le Masson, revealing snatches of sentences, words cut short by the camera's shifts. An investigative film in which the few activists still alive discover their old testimonies and tell us their silent story. The reconstruction of the lost soundtrack will remain in suspense; no happy ending will come to absorb the absence, to cancel the ferocious operation of time. An essay film about cinema that depicts their disappearance, and forever keeps them alive.

The revolutions that swept Latin America in the second half of the 20th century owe much to the participation of millions of Christians who engaged in political struggles in the name of their faith, paying a heavy toll for undermining the traditional relationship between the Church and power. Driven by Liberation theology, they challenged military regimes and oligarchies, risking their lives. Far from Marx's idea of religion as 'opium of the people', here the people fought for the advent of the Kingdom of God on Earth, rather than in Heaven.

Symbol in the eyes of urbanites of an authentic nature, the French forest is going through an unprecedented phase of industrialization. Heavy mechanization, monocultures, fertilizers and pesticides, forest management follows the intensive agricultural model at high speed. From Limousin to Landes, from Morvan to Vosges, Le Temps des Forêts offers a journey to the heart of industrial forestry and its alternatives. Living forest or wooded desert, today's choices will shape the landscape of tomorrow.

In a first-person documentary, Diako Yazdani, a political refugee in France, returns to see his family in Iraqi Kurdistan and introduces them to a 23-year-old gay man from Kojin who seeks to exist in a society where he seems unable to find its place. With humor and poetry, the director delivers a moving portrait where the meetings of each other invite to a universal reflection on the difference.

Ana Rosa was a pianist and the music was the only thing that went through the wall of silence. She was never talked about in the family, neither my father, nor my uncle psychiatrist, his children. But I was told many times that I looked like her.

The Senegal River forms the national border between Mauritania and Senegal. In 1989, war broke out between these countries, along and around the river. Both sides committed atrocities. Senegalese filmmaker Alassane Diago was just a young child at the time. Now he brings together his “Senegalese and Mauritanian family,” all victims or witnesses of the bloodbath, so they can talk in detail about their traumatic experiences. He wants to find the truth, and to bring about reconciliation. Why did they slaughter each other, and why were so many people “deported”? Was there systemic racism involved, under the white and Arab elite? Was it a case of ethnic cleansing?

Amir's life is marked by a great emptiness: since his teenage son was killed in a rocket attack, his wife barely speaks and his eldest son does nothing but cause trouble. His work as a letter carrier is the only thing that brings Amir a little peace and restores a little normalcy. But with the conquest of Kabul by the Mujahideen, his daily route through the city looks more and more like crossing a minefield.

On arriving in Esmeraldas, Ecuador, Patrice Raynal finds himself immersed in the tumult of a carnival. The music and dancing – more ambi­guous phenomena than first appears – provide the through-line for his first-person narrative.