CBA

In Ulan Bator, Mongolia, the cur Baatar is shot by a hunter hired by the authorities to get rid off the dogs in the city...

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.

A film adaptation of Michèle-Ann De Mey's "Sonatas 555" - choreographic variations on the highways and byways of love.

Keren is a performer, filmmaker, activist. At 20, she left Israel to grow as an artist and person. After eight years in Europe, she feels the need to return to the contradictions she left behind. She joins the rallies against Netanyahu, volunteers with Palestinian families, finds love, keeps filming. The October 7 attack occurs. The war and genocide begin. The fracture keeps deepening.

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.

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.

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.

Mary returns to Perú and her family with her previous film as a gift to her father, Lucho Jimenez, an eighty year old man with a lot of vitality. She proposes a caravan trip into his past, taking him to places where they spent their lives together, asking questions he never asked about his history, his family's history and his mother's death. During the filming of the movie, Mary learns that her father has a new engagement to a woman much younger than him and that he is about to adopt his new wife's child who was given to another family.

What is at the bottom of this dark hole, which a child's tear has dug in the sheet of paper? What are these strange hieroglyphs written on this board? It's not easy to be a schoolboy when letters and words get mixed up! It's not easy to make people recognise your different... Underneath it all, there are these assessments! Below fifty, you don't pass! So you have to hang on to stay in the race.

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.

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.

Flying over the city’s roofs the voice of an African storyteller takes us from one encounter to antoher in the everyday life of Brussels’ Zairians. In Northern « Matongué » they search continuously for their country through music, colors and words. By successive touches a mosaic of faces and silhouettes is filling the quietness of the district. They live with us. They walk in our streets. They dream in our walls. However, our eyes rarely meet.

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.

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.

Belgian filmmaker Eric Pauwels' meditation on dream, travel and film.

La Petite École in Brussels welcomes children who have never attended school, who are often from an immigrant background. Marie and Juliette have created a place outside of the classical structures of learning, where children can learn to be or become children again. But the price for this is the constant deconstruction of conventional education, and endless devotion.

In the heart of the alps, a group of men and women help migrants risking their lives as they cross the Franco-Italian border as they face cold nights and police controls. A visually powerful and stark contrast between the power of solidarity and disobedience.

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.

This is de facto a film about a film, with the only difference being that the focus is exclusively on the extras. They are filmed while waiting to take their turn, while conversing with others, and thinking about their performances. Although they take their duties very seriously and long to be stars, for the filmmakers, they’re just people that can be coordinated as necessary, nothing more. This film, on the contrary, gives them full consideration, revealing their personalities, what they experience, and what they dream of. The footage comes from many different places where movies are made, involving extras from all different nationalities.