ISKRA

Chris Marker’s A Grin Without a Cat is an epic political essay tracing the rise and decline of the global left from the 1960s to the 1970s. Through archival footage and commentary, the film examines revolutionary movements in France, Latin America, and beyond, reflecting on the ideals, failures, and fading hopes of a generation.

The violent break-up of former Yugoslavia is described from the Serbian point of view, using the story of ethnically mixed couple in war-torn city of Vukovar as metaphor.

In May 1968, workers, students and young people rise up against the morality and power of the establishment. Faculties and factories are under occupation. Barricades are erected. Paving slabs are launched. Words give way to actions. This is the confrontation. These images bear witness to the men and women who, in their indignancy, march towards their revolution. 50 years ago, as part of our ARC collective, we filmed the uprising of May and June 1968. Out of this material and scenes borrowed from our other filmmaker friends, we created this film.

Recounts Ireland's history from British colonization to the territory's division in 1922, then from 1968 details a decade of events through images and eyewitness accounts of killings and such massacres as the infamous "Bloody Sunday" as the IRA argues their cause.

In 1923 the scientist Von Dracula invented Vampisol, a drink that allowed vampires to live in the sun. La Capa Nostra and the European Vampire Group confront each other in Havana to control the Vampisol, but Pepe, Von Dracula's nephew, sang the Vampisol formula for free on Radio Vampiro Internacional. Now Pepe must face the Nazi vampires, who use the most powerful Vampisol: El Vampiyaba.

A documentary look at striking workers in a textile plant in Besançon, France, centering on interviews with workers about their motivations for becoming involved with the union and the struggles of their day to day life.

A series of 43 documentary shorts, directed (without credit) by several famous French filmmakers and each running between two and four minutes. Each "tract" espouses a leftist political viewpoint through the filmed depiction of real-life events, including workers' strikes and the events of Paris in May '68.

In the 1968 movement in Paris, Jean-Luc Godard made a 16mm, 3-minute long film, Film-tract No.1968, Le Rouge, in collaboration with French artist Gérard Fromanger. Starting with the shot identifying its title written in red paint on the Le Monde for 31 July 1968, the film shows the process of making Fromanger’s poster image, which is thick red paint flows over a tri-color French flag. —Hye Young Min

Six years after I left my country, Brazil, I was sent an old sound reel in the post and I discovered a recording of my parent's wedding ceremony. I was twenty-six. It was the first time I'd ever heard my mother's voice as she died when I was a year old. I was terribly moved and I decided to go to Brazil.

Marta and Karina are sex workers also studying to become lawyers. Filmed over ten years, this documentary captures their unlikely journey from prostitution to the defense of women's rights.

In a humanitarian camp opened in Paris, refugees are in transit. In this "first reception" center, they are resting from the street where they were stranded when they arrived in France. A few days of humanity, that we spend with them. But already, they have to face the Prefecture and hear the cold administrative sentence. We are always with them.

Paris, Latin Quarter. A small cinema that is both famous and marginal, Action Christine. The cashier has taken her camcorder and takes us to this public place, her workplace. Place of life, of passage, of meeting, a window open on the street, behind the hygienic phone, it is the daily life of the cashiers and the openers punctuated by the alternation of surging entrances and idle intersession.

On April 27, 1968, workers from the Rhodiaceta factory in Besançon gathered at the village hall of Palente-les-Orchamps to attend the screening of the film À bientôt j'espoir by Mario Marret and Chris Marker. This sound documentary reproduces the critical debate that followed. In June 1969, Pol Cèbe, the head of the Cultural Center of Palente-les-Orchamps, brought to this documentary a conclusion in the form of a report. Echoing an intense debate after the screening of À bientôt j'espoir, La Charnière by the Groupe Medvedkine captures those moments when workers expressed dissatisfaction with the way they were portrayed.

Writer and pedagogue Fernand Deligny influenced a number of artists and French intellectuals. His work on autism influenced Deleuze and Guattari's theory of the rhizome. Francois Truffaut turned to his ideas to complete Les 400 Coups. Throughout the film Deligny plays with the possibilities of the camera to live and think closer to the human subject, offering with Le Moindre Geste a unique film to the world, one of most fascinating in French cinema. Situated [visually] between mountain western and integral neorealism, the film tells the story of two teenagers, escaped prisoners of an asylum, running away through the Cevennes.

Pauline, Norah, Kristina and others wait for hours, sitting under a hut deep in the Bois de Vincennes. In front of the administrative detention center (CRA) in Paris, they have all come to see their loved ones locked up. Lives on hold, awaiting deportation or release. On this stage, these women tell their stories, talk to each other, share their experience, their revolt and their dreams with new visitors. They are the mirror of migrant detention, its reverse view.

Composed entirely of still photographs taken by Chris Marker across 26 countries, If I Had Four Dromedaries presents a dialogue between three voices reflecting on the meaning of images and travel. Through this photo-essay form, Marker explores the relationship between still and moving images and the act of seeing itself.