Michel Lagourdette
as Self
Arlette Lagourdette
as Self (voice)
Arthur Valois--Lagourdette
In 1939 a young Romanian woman met a soldier. Love blossomed, but the man was sent to the front. They continued to write passionate letters to each another, but when she had to move they lost contact. She was never able to forget him. Will they ever meet again?
Driven by a personal interest in finding out how people deal with the sudden loss of their familiar structures and surroundings, director Jonas Kaufmann embarks on an emotional journey on behalf of Generation Z. A journey with the aim of finding the one inviolable point of human existence that gives us support when everything is lost. In our documentary, protagonist Roman Sachuk and Jonas Kaufmann take on the challenge of providing partial answers to the central questions of a generation in crisis.
Between 1944 and 1953, 170,000 Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians put up fierce resistance to the Soviet invasion, hiding deep in the vast Baltic forests. Driven by a dream of freedom, they defied a ruthless empire with few resources but unwavering determination. Through previously unseen archives and the poignant accounts of the last survivors, this documentary reveals their clandestine struggle, their heroic sacrifices, and their legacy, timeless symbols of a desperate fight to escape the Soviet stranglehold and preserve the flame of independence.
Five friends reside in a home for injured guerrillas in Rojava, a post-war region. Portrays the hopes and dreams of the soldiers, who were once the world's heroes but are now abandoned in their fight for equality in the Middle East.
Dmytro Komarov's documentary project The Year. Kharkiv Region. Dmytro Komarov will show Kharkiv in the first months of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops. Viewers will hear the stories of people who found themselves in the epicentre of the brutal attacks: at the air defence base destroyed by a Russian missile, in the residential area of the city - Northern Saltivka - which was ravaged by shelling. The journalist will talk to those who played a key role in the liberation of the Kharkiv region. One of these people is Roman Hryshchuk, the commander of the 127th separate territorial defence brigade of Ukraine. He told us how the military practice of the past - using decoys in the form of dummies - helped to identify and destroy the occupiers. How did the full-scale war begin for Kharkiv? What plans did the enemy have for Kharkiv? What united people and gave them hope in the most difficult times? Find out in the documentary project "Year. Kharkiv Region".
A documentary about a lost generation of young Russians: arriving from places all over Russia, they now live in an improvised private shelter in Tbilisi in Georgia: a student couple, a singer, a journalist, a Navalny activist, a gay blogger, and former politician. They are ordinary citizens who had never considered emigration. They do not belong to the famous avant-garde resistance but are still committed to an open and democratic civil society. In the last six months, 500,000 Russians are said to have left Russia. They are threatened not by tanks or missiles, but by the regime's ever-increasing repression, which hits any criticism of the war and any form of civic activism. Forced to leave their homeland by Putin's war, they live as digital dissidents searching for a new home.
Triggered by Russia's invasion of Ukraine in early spring of 2022, Ukrainian journalist and writer Ivan Avramov struggles to navigate his fluid identity and the shifting reality around him.
He is Khagani Aliyev, a resident of Saricali village of Aghdam. On July 23, 1993, Khagani Aliyev, who heard about another Armenian attack on Aghdam, went home to take his parents who had not left the village to a temporary safe area...
Born on March 25, 1840, Gustave Guillaumet discovered Algeria by chance when he was about to embark for Italy. Over the course of his ten or eleven trips and extended stays, he established a familiarity with this space. Traveling through the different regions from north to south, he never ceases to note the differences. He is also the first artist, apart from Delacroix's Women of Algiers, to penetrate into female interiors and reveal the reality, far removed from the harem fantasies that reigned in his time. Fascinated by the country, its deserts and its inhabitants , going so far as to live like the Algerians, Gustave Guillaumet devoted his life and his painting to this country, breaking with the colorful and exotic representations of the time. The painting The Famine in Algeria, restored thanks to exceptional fundraising, was dictated by the events of the years 1865-1868, and well illustrates his knowledge of the country, in a manner that is at once demanding, sensitive and serious.
Orientalism is a literary and artistic movement born in Western Europe in the 18th century. Through its scale and popularity, throughout the 19th century, it marked the interest and curiosity of artists and writers for the countries of the West (the Maghreb) or the Levant (the Middle East). Orientalism was born from the fascination of the Ottoman Empire and followed its slow disintegration and the progression of European colonizations. This exotic trend is associated with all the artistic movements of the 19th century, academic, romantic, realistic or even impressionist. It is present in architecture, music, painting, literature, poetry... Picturesque aesthetics, confusing styles, civilizations and eras, orientalism has created numerous clichés and clichés that we still find today in literature or cinema.
“There was excitement in the air,” says Donga, now in his late twenties, describing his feelings when the uprising against Muammar Gaddafi’s rule broke out in 2011. He was 19, living in Misrata, and boldly went to film the fighting with a friend. A decade later, in a hotel in Istanbul, where he has been living since he was wounded in battle, he looks back on the past ten years through excerpts from his videos. And he reflects on how that period has affected him.
A history of the American War of Independence.
As the peaceful and determined Hirak movement gathers momentum and hopes for profound political change sweep across Algeria, women are combining femininity and feminism in the past, present, and future.
In the aftermath of war, an extraordinary professor brings hope to children haunted by trauma-induced nightmares.
Amid the failing counteroffensive, a journalist follows a Ukrainian platoon on their mission to traverse one mile of heavily fortified forest and liberate a strategic village from Russian occupation. But the farther they advance through their destroyed homeland, the more they realize that this war may never end.
Before World War II the 3 sisters Mia, Uschi, and Martha were born in the former German city of Wrocław, which became Polish in 1945. They have been shaped by poverty, National Socialism, war, and escape, but also by peace, reconstruction, and an affluent society of Germany. The detailed stories they tell us in front of the camera, 75 years after World War II has ended, are as individual as the 3 sisters themselves.
Since August 2024, in Martinique, a popular protest movement against the high cost of living has been reemerging under the leadership of the RPPRAC (Rassemblement Pour La Protection Des Peuples Et Des Ressources Afro-Caribéens – Gathering for the Protection of Afro-Caribbean Peoples and Resources). On the island, food prices are on average 54% higher than in mainland France.* Through various cultural figures, the people of Martinique are expressing their anger and seeking concrete solutions. *Source: Kiprix, Price comparison between supermarkets in the French overseas territories and mainland France.
Fayçal Hammoum recounts the 2014 presidential election through non-voting inhabitants of Algiers who, like him, are in their thirties. Be it Bilel, a grocer by default exposed to his customers’ political babbling, or the more politically-charged comments of Younes, a militant FM radio journalist opposed to President Bouteflika’s fourth term, the variety of conversational scenes in no way changes the determination not to vote for an old man who has been invisible for almost two years. The rappers Omar and Brahim are as bereft of hope and voter’s cards as the Tellek webradio DJ, since “the match is fixed”. Moving away from his focus on this subject to film their daily life, the filmmaker draws the portrait of a generation who, as Bilal says with poignant simplicity, “just wants to live