Cobra Films

Nopumoceno, the most successful businessman in the Cabo Verde archipelogo, is an ambitious, clever opportunist, known during his lifetime as "eternity single". However, he is then discovered by his illegitimate daughter to have gotten his fortune and his women in unorthodox and incredible ways

Guided by the evocative narration of Charlotte Rampling, Nostalgia for the Future is a descent into the labyrinthine world of Chris Marker, the “best-known author of unknown films,” who spent a lifetime concealing himself behind a veil of pseudonyms and images of cats. Moving through a constellation of personal documents and film fragments, an archivist attempts to decode the man through the material traces he left behind. By repurposing and recontextualizing Marker’s own body of work, the film treats his images as “time machines,” transforming the archive into a landscape of living memory. Nostalgia for the Future is a meditation on memory, identity, and the power our past images hold over the futures we imagine.

Le Cercle des noyés is the name given in Mauritania to black political prisoners imprisoned from 1987 in the old colonial fortress of Oualata. This film touches on the fragile process of unveiling memories by one of these former prisoners who remembers his story and that of his companions. In a visual echo, the places of their confinement come one after another denuded from any traces of that past.

When giants die let three generations look back on the street happenings around parties and manifestations. The grandfather appears as a ghost and represents processions organized by order of cities and municipalities. It is his son who places the parades in a series of processions, historical processions, parades, traditional parties and carnival parties. Criticism and attraction play their game. Finally, the grandson searches for contemporary forms and points to demonstrations, manifestations. Reclaiming the street, forming a community, expressing thoughts on the street, together outside, ... 'The street, the mother of democracy', is how it sounds through a robot-controlled horn. To give up the street is to lose freedom.

Arbres is the story of the Tree and trees. It begins with the Origins and then embarks upon a journey through the world of the tree and the trees of the world. The film reveals the huge differences and slight similarities between the Tree and Man, investigating the fascinating idea that, amongst plants, the tree fulfils the role played by man in the animal kingdom.

Under the White Mask: The Film Haesaerts Could Have Made uses fragments of Under the Black Mask, a 1958 film about Congolese art directed by the Belgian artist Paul Haesaerts, which has been qualified as colonial propaganda. This new film imagines what the masks – now subjects, and not objects – would say. Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism is spoken in Lingala for the first time. This speech is still a critical mirror for Europe. Under The White Mask is limited to the elements already existing in 1958.

"Beyond the Ararat" is the story of a woman of Turkish origin who embarks on a journey to better understand what makes up her identity. A road movie which brings her from her childhood neighborhood in Brussels to Turkey and Armenia. A quest where each woman she encounters could be the reflection of herself. Entering the land of her ancestors, Anatolia, she questions her cultural heritage. Stopping in her grandmother's village, she discovers the "Agit"; an antique oral tradition where women sing for their dead. The songs open a potential space for mourning, where Turkish, Kurdish but also Armenian women missing from that land, can sing "together". The confrontation with the "missing" from her memory, brings her farther eastward in Anatolia to the foot of the Ararat Mountain, and beyond.

How do Europeans deal with their recent dark history (the wars, dictatorships and occupations)? What traces are etched?

Hélène, a struggling young actress, is trying to learn the text of the 'Lady From the Sea' by heart. At the same time she is emptying her grandmother’s apartment. The apartment, situated near the beach, becomes a place to escape in thoughts and dreams.

In Managua, Nicaragua, teenager Sujeylin Aguilar raises her newborn daughter Karla on the same streets she has been calling home for the past eight years. Based in a city park and part of a larger group of youngsters, mother and baby struggle to reach the little one's first birthday. Beautifully told and full of hope, Karla's Arrival offers an intense personal story about second generation street children.

Human beings who have experienced such a strong shock that they are no longer even afraid of death (as it often happens to genocide survivors) sometimes fall into what is known as a feeling of timelessness or a “melancholy”. They live somewhat “outside” time, a mode of extra-temporal existence, waiting for the day on which they will be freed from their suffering. It is the people — almost ghosts having survived the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenians and Azerbaijani that has lasted for almost twenty years — that the filmmaker shows and listens to in his film. Behind them, behind their wandering bodies, behind their frenzies, is what remains of the collapse of the Soviet Union in Caucasus: ruins, uninhabited spaces, tombs, vestiges of war, trenches where soldiers watch for an invisible enemy.

Like a puzzle, this film works on different elements: a guided tour in the waste lands of three cities (Brussels, Hamburg, Roma), a documentary about stray cats and the people who food it, some choreography of daily gesture, a question about cartography (and the common using of space), like a "wink" about the human Order and Chaos and a statement on the present difficulties of the Inutility.

2009 documentary by Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd, set in Belgium, Senegal, the Ardennes and Western Sahara.

Straddling a 2,400-kilometer-long wall constructed by the Moroccan army, the Western Sahara is today divided into two sections — one occupied by Morocco, the other under the control of the Sahrawi National Liberation Movement’s Polisario Front. Drawing from stories of flight, exile, interminable waiting and the arrested, persecuted lives on both sides of that wall, this film bears witness to the Sahrawi people, their land, their entrapment in other people’s dreams. In an esthetic that sublimates the real, Lost Land resonates like a score that juxtaposes sonorous landscapes, black-and-white portraits and nomadic poetics.

I travelled across Mauritania to find a tree that I saw from my window in Belgium. It wasn't a mythical tree, but rather one that could be anywhere. On my way, I met men and women who shared their perception of this quest and in doing so, in a roundabout way they shared some of their visions of the world and of existence. For some, my tree was the sign from the spirits, of the invisible or a call from light. For others, it was the symbol of a history, a culture or the end of a period in time. For yet others, it was a tree that you see only when you get lost...

A random refugee wanders without purpose or direction 150 kilometres above the Arctic Circle.

The flim follows Congolese artist/photographer Mekhar Kivoso as he explores the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, during its renovation. The objects he encounters are both captivating and alienating, embodying his cultural heritage. Through his camera, he discovers a macabre mausoleum of his cultural heritage. But instead of dwelling on the past, Mekhar uses it to project himself into the future.