Dérives

The film Announcements paints the portraits of seven women reflecting on the same theme. Their starting point is the announcement to Hagar, Sarah and Mary as in the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Koran. Their thoughts spread out and weave a new web, drawing strands from their associations and interpretations of these texts. And by talking about their own history, their personal myths, they work up to subjects such as the birth of image in the Christian world or that of poetry in ancient Greece. Announcements is a film about the movement of thought, the power of words, the secret of the voice, and the seduction of the image.

A hill in Kyrgyzstan inhabited by men, women, some children. Smoke, birds, a waste dump like a Leviathan. Among them, a traumatized former soldier, a grieving mother, young people deprived of a future, living and facing their destiny.

A café in the north of Brussels. Days are punctuated by the songs that the customers sing at all hours, to amuse themselves, to remember or to pass the time. Those songs transform the place little by little, making the film a strange musical.

i was home with my kid and, all of a sudden, i get a voice message from raquel — i hadn’t heard from her in a long time — so i listened to it, and she tells me all these things and then she asks, do you remember moon safari? and i’m like, of course, of course i remember moon safari

Violeta and Vyollca Dukay live in the south of Kosovo, close to the border with Albania. Faced with a very high unemployment in their country since the end of the war, they became deminers. They’ve been going to the minefields every day for six years now. The unique and very strong relationship that exists between the two sisters helps them to overcome their fear and to keep hoping in spite of the precariousness of their situation and the risks they run each day to earn their living.

Porcupine evokes the fragmented tale of a young man who breaks into an empty hospital to set up his online broadcast of poses and provocations; his audience includes real-life participants with anonymous tags like ‘bigballnz’ and ‘romeoazteca’.

A computer screen, images from the four corners of the world. We cross borders in one-click while another trip’s story reach us in bits, through text messages, chats, phone conversations, and an immigration office’s questionnaire. It’s the journey of Shahin, a 20-year-old Iranian boy who, fleeing his country alone, lands in Greece, then winds his way to England where he claims asylum.

Everyone calls him Kev, this pale-looking redhead, who a social worker found, as a child, locked in a bedroom where he had only rays of sunshine to play with. Now a teenager, Kevin suffers from a form of autism so severe that the majority of so-called specialised institutions have long refused to take him in. Clémence Hébert followed him with her camera, from one place to another. She, who is gifted with speech and he, who lives without, tamed each other as peers with a lens as the only medium of recognition, which captures what palpitates, appears, withers, and recommences. A discontinued but living link.

She was born in a cave, more than 60 years ago. Now she lives in a village, with many children and grandchildren to look after. Sometimes, she dreams of her dead mother calling her home – to the cave.

One day, the tree is considered mature. In any case, it is exploitable for the industry. So, we mark it and then cut it down. With the chainsaw or the harvester, it depends. And then it becomes biomass, pallets, panels, pellets, crates, paper pulp for printing promotions. But what profit does man get from the pains he takes under the sun?

After the fall of Assad’s regime, five survivors return to the former torture prison of Saidnaya to reenact what they experienced there during their incarceration. They reclaim their voices and bear witness for those who can no longer speak for themselves.

At the beginning of winter, a filmmaker retires for six months to a hermit's cabin in the middle of the forest, cut off from the world and its means of communication. Through the words of four women she has filmed previously, all of whom have dedicated their lives to different forms of spirituality, she embarks on a mysterious inner adventure, on the edge of solitude and nature. A journey that invites us to connect with the world in a different way.

Victor is 17. He is gradually losing his eyesight. That is irrevocable. Refusing his handicap, Victor fights to live like an average teenager and becoming an adult just like the others. Today, Victor is ready to take off to go to University and study Law.

After surviving ISIS prisons as a child, Rashid has been reunited with his family in Sinjar, northwestern Iraq. Now a teenager, the young Yazidi dreams of a brighter future. But peace is fragile, and hatred against his community is resurfacing.

From Belgium, Jialai Wang maintains contact via smartphone and camera with her mother and grandmother in China. When her grandmother’s health deteriorates, Jialai returns to Shanghai, but when she arrives, her grandmother has already died, and she is left alone with her mother. A devout Buddhist, her mother seems to pay more attention to her daily prayers, Maoist past and dog Dongdong than she does to her daughter. She herself had been abandoned as a child by her own mother, when she divorced Jialai’s grandfather and moved to the city.

Documentary about what makes a house a home.

What happens when a world that relies on traffic and the logistics that allow it comes to a standstill? What happens when sickness and even death are taken from us?

An intimate portrait of director Peter Brook by his son, Simon Brook.

In Italy, in the mid-seventies, Adriana, Barbara, Nadia and Susanna were 20 years old when they decided to join the armed struggle and leave behind their social life and their families in order to make the revolution the center and the aim of their existence. Today they have returned after many years in prison, and they try, each one of them, to recount their own experiences. They speak about the political reasons which initially sustained them, the conflicts, the doubts, and the moments of being torn apart which market out their lives as women caught up in the vortex of war. A course of events which ended in the condemnation of the armed struggle and the pain of the lives that were destroyed – their victims’ lives and their own.

The Amazon flows lazily through the goldmine-gashed landscape of northern Peru. Using real eyewitness accounts, directors Bénédicte Liénard and Mary Jiménez tell the story of a young woman who winds up in the clutches of forced prostitution when her initially hopeful attempt to escape the constrictions of her village goes wrong. Step by step, she is robbed of her moral and physical integrity. The film reconstitutes a space of dignity and returns voice and identity to a fate formally made nameless. With its powerful imagery, the girl’s traumatic odyssey embodies the destruction of life in a capitalist world in connection with horrific natural devastation.