Allo La France
In so-called "peripheral" France, where public services are disappearing or being dematerialised according to a purely utilitarian logic, I use the disappearance of the public telephone as a symbol. This road-movie in search of these twentieth-century ruins is built around telephone conversations, archives and chance encounters. It's also a journey through time. I'm looking for traces of abandoned collective projects, displaced political horizons and unfulfilled promises of emancipation. From the disappearance of the telephone booth to the advent of the "medical booth", I question what we call "progress".
"a charming and thought-provoking investigation into the inevitability of progress and the complexities of globalization" - True/False
Life is Beautiful
Life is Beautiful tells the story of how director Mohamed Jabaly fought for his rights as a Palestinian and a filmmaker, when stranded in Norway due to circumstances beyond his control. Through his personal archive and video calls, he shares his love and longing for his hometown, friends and family, as he tries to make a new life for himself in the arctic. The film is a love letter to Gaza, to his adopted hometown in Tromsø, and to the empowering force of storytelling.
“A timely cinematic expression of the universal need to be recognised in our full humanity. A compelling indictment of the bureaucratic and political structures that deny that. A directorial tone that, almost impossibly, manages to find hope and humour amid unimaginable pain. An urgent call for freedom, freedom of movement, freedom of opportunity and the freedom to pursue our dreams.” *Winner*, IDFA Award for the Best Directing in the International Competition, 2023
*not available Canada, USA, Norway
The Zola Experience
Anne is a theatre director. She has separated from her husband and is moving house. She is dull, without desires. She meets Ben, a helpful neighbour and jobless actor. He looks at her with passionate eyes; she never wants to tie herself to a man again. But when she decides to stage Zola's “L'assommoir”, it is to him that she proposes the role of Coupeau, casting herself in the one of Gervaise. As the story unfolds, the boundary between real life and the play becomes increasingly blurred; Between readings and rehearsals, between research and study, reality fades into fiction, and the two seem to retrace exactly all the steps of Coupeau and Gervaise's story, all the way to ruin.
"Art and life fuse deliriously.....It is as if the border between performance and life has entirely collapsed." - Guardian
Blix Not Bombs
Greta had just turned 8 years old when she watched the unfolding of 9/11 on her tv in Stockholm. In the following months and years she saw her fellow countryman, the diplomat Hans Blix, become a major player in the global crisis, as weapons inspector for the UN. Now, in the 21st century of wars, political extremes and the climate catastrophes, Greta reaches out to Blix, now 94 years old, to ask if he can help her make sense of the world. Does diplomacy still have a role? Or is he the last of the great negotiators?
"insightful and a vivid time capsule for the grim and mendacious era of the war on terror...Blix himself is good-natured and decent; his faith in the primacy of facts still has something heroic about it." - Guardian
Avant-Drag!
Avant-Drag! offers an exhilarating look at ten Athenian drag performers who deconstruct gender, nationalism, belonging, identity, while facing police brutality, transphobia and racism. As entertaining as it is thought-provoking, Avant-Drag! challenges societal norms and reshapes perceptions about LGBTQ+ culture by capturing the intimate lives of a tightly-knit group of drag performers, proving that being othered never felt so familiar.
"a profound and moving celebration of queerness and the art of drag" - International Cinephile Society