Spectre Productions

An experimental documentary film of collective research into creolization, addressing its historical, ontological and cultural forces.

The exemplary adventure of Somankidi Coura, an agricultural cooperative founded in Mali in 1977 by West African immigrant workers living in workers' accommodation in France, sheds light on the violence of colonial agriculture and the ecological challenges in Africa today.

After a devastating earthquake, Nga, an old elephant and probably the last of its species, and Sanra, his mahout, are about to embark on a journey to find the mythical elephant’s graveyard. The group of poachers following them will die one after the other under mysterious circumstances and spells.

Apiyemiyekî? addresses the genocide of the Waimiri-Atroari people in 1970s, when during the Brazilian dictatorship indigenous lands in the mid-west were invaded for the construction of the national road BR-174 and the installation of a mining company. Illustrations about the period, created by the indigenous population, including children, reveal a traumatic history, referring us to the present day.

The first image is in black and white, upside down and projected into a black box that then becomes the frame. It now hovers like a time capsule near a man’s face. He looks down, listening in on a female guerrilla fighter and translating her words from Fulani. Within the capsule, money is counted and paid out as a new currency, the numbers of the years run backwards in the black box. A 16-mm film glides through the man's hands and is transferred to a laptop screen frame by frame.

Guinea-Bissau, 1969. A violent war between the Portuguese colonial army and the guerrillas of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea. Nome leaves his village and joins the maquis. After years, he will return as a hero, but joy will soon give way to bitterness and cynicism.

Melrick is an unruly young boy who spends his summer in French Guiana at his grandmother's house to escape his turbulent daily life in Stains, France. At the end of his stay, he plays the drum to revive the memory of his late uncle, Lucas Diomar, who died in tragic circumstances. Despite a wave of murders of young men shaking the headlines, Melrick becomes aware of his place in a family destroyed by irreparable grief.

Reflecting on the legacy of Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture, "Ouvertures" follows a collective’s process of translating Édouard Glissant’s play Monsieur Toussaint from French to Creole.

"Há terra! is an encounter, a hunt, a diachronic tale of looking and becoming. As in a game, as in a chase, the film errs between character and land, land and character, predator and prey."

In the dark night, off the Comoros archipelago, Patron learns how to become « Commandant ». Soon he will take his first clandestine passengers to Mayotte.

 “Look closely at the mountains!”: the phrase was coined by artist Manfredo de Souzanetto during Brazil’s years of dictatorhsip. Mining activities were destroying the environment in the state of Minas Gerais in the south west of the country. Through editing, Ana Vaz draws parallels between this region and the very distant Nord-Pas-de-Calais in northern France, also marked by over three centuries of mining. On one side, eroded mountains plague its inhabitants with deadly landslides. Hollow and gutted, these mountains become the receptacles of a ghostly memory. On the other side, in France, mining waste stacks become mountains and reservoirs of biodiversity, where the frontier between nature and technology is now indiscernible.

On present-day Reunion Island, Patrice finds out about his brother's murder from the mouth of his killer. The same day, he is evicted from his own house. Whilst his mother cries out for revenge, Patrice would like to find a home... and keep his mind.

A piece of blank white paper placed and pulsating before a camera’s lens attracts a crowd of passers-by in Tunis, the simplicity of the conceit slowly opening up to a profound reflection on the nature of cinema itself (both its creation and its collective viewing) while tracing the forms of a particular social and political landscape.

From Colorado, where he has chosen to live, Fouad Mennana begins to trace his late grandfather - Amara Mennana - an Algerian farmer expropriated from his land and deported to the prisons of French Guiana in 1926.

"The Green Vessel" tells the journey and the story of an old man on a river. Like a storyteller, he shares with us a story: the tale of a scientist who discovers a contaminated river and tries to understand the sources of this problem. Accompanied by an artist and a young guide, he pursues his research in remotes territories covered by a large forest. As the old narrator continues his tale, he engages himself in a long journey between river and vegetation, a quest that connects him to his own story.

We went to research the conditions of the students in the guerrilla schools in the mangroves. Instead, we soon became ourselves the learners and the first lesson was how to walk. In the mangrove school the learning happens with the whole body.

Thibault, Isabelle and their son Jeremie board their sailboat Joshua to sail the world and live a new life. The Gulf of Aden is watched over by Somali pirates, and while stopping in Djibouti, the happy family meets Mike, a black they know nothing about but innately trust. Inviting Mike to board the ship, the quartet travels onward in their sailboat…

A new production center, maybe set in an undetermined future. What is being produced here? We shall find out by following the given traces. Two pairs of hands trying to untangle themselves. A human sheep virtually cut into pieces. A warm welcome to the authors and actors of their lives. Stories being told, their narrators dissected. When the gates open, those leaving Labour Power Plant have been made fit for the demands of the labour market. The next production cycle begins… People with their own wills, interests, and desires are being equipped with the different physiological, cognitive, psychological, and social core competencies to transform them into human resources. Meanwhile, the management is introducing new methods to enrich the products with the innovative features of ‘self-evaluation’, ‘self-optimisation’, and, most importantly, ‘self-fulfilment’. A series of interventions are performed, leading to an assembly that may appear strange at first sight.

Dui ma? is a game of fragmentary stories. Emergencies. A hallucinatory account of the violent changes in China today, written freehand, in a visual style where one apparition chases the other. Nothing sets in except the feeling of a tremor. François Daireaux draws with this new film a vast social choreography where matter competes with the living with the absent bodies. Landscapes are consumed, cities appear without measure and in the middle the rough ballet of men who seek their place in a too big world. It is sometimes burlesque, often strange and ultimately perfectly chilling. Nothing is lost, everything is transformed.