Les Films d'Ici Méditerranée

February 1939. Overwhelmed by the flood of Republicans fleeing Franco's dictatorship, the French government's solution consists in confining the Spanish refugees in concentration camps where they have no other choice than to build their own shelters, feed off the horses which have carried them out of their country, and die by the hundred for lack of hygiene and water... In one of these camps, two men, separated by barbwire, will become friends. One is a guard the other is Josep Bartoli (Barcelona 1910 - New York 1995), a cartoonist who fights against the Franco regime.

80 years are gone since The Little Prince was released. Author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was also a pilot, and we follow his last four years from his US exile to when his plane in 1944 disappeared over The Mediterranean without any trace.

New York, 2010. Jeff Harris, a music journalist, sets out to uncover the truth about Francisco Tenório Júnior, a young Brazilian samba-jazz pianist who disappeared in Buenos Aires on March 18, 1976.

In picturesque Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, a battle for the soul of public education exposes deepening political and cultural divides. This gripping documentary follows the rise of far-right Christian nationalists vying for control of the local school board, targeting LGBTQ+ books and promoting a theocratic agenda under the guise of religious values. As moderate Republicans resign, extremists fill the vacuum, pushing censorship and white-supremacist ideologies. With democracy and secular education on the line, a few brave citizens resist the tide. Through charged school board meetings and grassroots activism, the film captures a chilling portrait of a community in crisis—and the LGBTQ+ students who risk being erased.

In times of environmental crises and human beings’ growing alienation from nature, some thinkers are questioning the prevailing anthropocentric view: What space for animals in our very human world? This documentary features human philosophers Viciane Despret and Baptiste Morizot as well as the dog Alba and the wild horse Stipa.

Located in Berwyn, a deprived Chicago suburb, the laundromat run by Tom Benson, reputed to be the largest in the world, is an institution for those residents on a tight budget: an immersion into this microcosm where, despite extreme poverty, everyone still believes in the so-called American dream and strives to fulfill it.

In 2015, Ossamah Al Mohsen and her son were the victims of a trip on the Hungarian border by a television reporter in her desperate flight from a Syria at war. The cameras captured this moment by scandalizing public opinion. This kick allowed Ossamah, famous soccer coach in his country, to arrive in Madrid and resume his profession. But the rest of his family did not have the same luck. The story of Ossamah allows us to reflect on the survival of thousands of Syrian families trapped in Turkey but also that of Moatassam, Youssef and Muhannad, three promising Syrian footballers who were robbed of the best years of their lives by war.

Autumn 1985. A storm awakens the Mediterranean. A village is devastated, crops destroyed. On the beach, the waves have washed up a whale. Dead, it is declared a carrier of disease. Corbac, a sick and misanthropic winegrower, wants to save the cetacean's skeleton from being blown up for sanitary reasons. Day and night, his daughter Mathilde watches as the largest of creatures is paraded piece by piece in front of the church, the school, and the distillery, awakening the unconsciousness and violence of the villagers. Mathilde knows her father. He will see it through to the end...

A philosopher of complexity, Edgar Morin has renewed the figure of the intellectual. Born Edgar Nahoum in Paris in 1921, he joined the Communist Resistance in 1942, where he adopted the pseudonym Morin, which he never abandoned. Author of about a hundred books, doctor "honoris causa" of about forty universities in the world, he never stopped promoting human brotherhood.

The most notorious terrorist in Tunisia in the years 2013-2014, Kamel Gadhgadhi, turns out to have been a close friend of the director at university. The surprise of this discovery prompts him to reflect on the question of how he became a terrorist...

1889. Having come to France as part of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show Tour for the Paris World Fair, Rahimé Valladier, known as the Mexican, sets off in search of the Holy Spirit, a treasure supposedly left behind by his ancestors, Protestants from the Cévennes who had fled Catholic repression following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). Back on his ancestral land, and despite the new-found freedom of religion, he discovered the Cévennes people's struggle to survive: after the boom in silkworms and mining, the Cévennes became impoverished from the mid-19th century onwards. At the same time, a law imposed the French language on schools, to the detriment of Occitan. A culture was dying.

Imagine an oasis: it's there in the desert, thousands of years old but forgotten. A grain of sand in the universe. This oasis is Figuig. It was cut in two when France drew the border between Morocco and Algeria. The border also drew a line between two populations and ended millennia of oral transmission.

A passionate photographer from an early age, Dolorès Marat spent much of her life in photo labs, developing shots for fashion magazines. In the early 1990s, at the dawn of her forties, she decided to devote herself to her personal work. Today, she is exhibited worldwide. With her Leica camera in hand, Dolorès Marat takes an intimate look at her surroudings. She shots on the spot, as the blue hour settles. In her photographs, a dream-like strangeness overlaps the triviality of everyday life. Director Armelle Sèvre, also a photographer, wanted to see the world through Dolorès’ eyes. Together, the two women will scour the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, in search of a wave… Carried along by a bewitching soundtrack, this film dives in the enigmatic, hazy and colorful universe of a singular artist.