CHŒURS EN EXIL

77 minutes, 2015
Directors: Nathalie ROSSETTI (Belgium, Italy) and Turi FINOCCHIARO (Belgium, Italy)
Production: Les Productions du Lagon (France), Borak Films (Belgium), Touch Films (Poland)

To pass on an ancient tradition of religious chant, Aram and Virginia, two Armenians now living outside their country, take a group of European actors from Wroclaw’s Grotowski Institute on a first-time journey to Anatolia where this style of singing once flourished. Along the way, their questions reveal the wealth of a destroyed culture: singing and acting then become the language of creation and sharing, the breath of life.

Nathalie ROSSETTI et Turi FINOCCHIARO

After university studies at Bologna’s DAMS (Discipline delle Arte, della Musica et dello Spettacolo), complemented by theatre training with Orazio Costa in Florence, Nathalie Rossetti worked as assistant director and musical consultant on several feature films.
With the help of her husband Turi Finocchiaro, she has directed several short films before turning to creative documentaries. The subjects closest to her are art, endangered cultures, anthropology and human rights.
In 2007, she created the Faito Doc Festival near Naples, an international documentary festival of which she is the artistic director.

After university, Turi Finocchiaro worked on several international co-productions as stage manager, production manager and executive producer. Familiar with how the EU works, he created EFC, a consulting firm for developing European co-productions (Media & Eurimages).
With his company, Impronte Digitali, he produced his first documentary in Rome in 1998. Back in Belgium in 2004, he turned to co-direction with Nathalie Rossetti. In 2009 they created Borak Films.
Turi Finocchiaro has participated in the EAVE and EURODOC training programmes. He is artistic co-director of the Faito Doc Festival, created in 2007 with Nathalie Rossetti.

ARABIC MOVIE

62 minutes, 2015
Director: Eyal SAGUI BEZAWIE (Israel) and Sara TSIFRONI (Israel)
Production: Trabelsi Productions (Israel)

At the time when Israel’s worst enemy was Egypt, Israeli television used to broadcast an Egyptian film every week.
Even today, many Israelis look back with nostalgia at that Friday night ritual, a time when television only had one channel. Everyone used to watch the Arab film of the week, but how many wondered how the official Israeli television company managed to cross the border to get these films, and what was the reason for this persistent desire to show films made by the “enemy”?

Eyal BEZAWIE SAGI is a researcher specializing in Egyptian cinema and popular culture. He studied Arab literature, Middle Eastern history and cultural studies, now teaching in several art and film schools.
He also works as a television writer and as editor in the art and culture department of the daily newspaper Haaretz. “Arabic Movie” is his first film.

Sara TSIFRONI studied sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv University.
In 1992 she began working as a journalist on several newspapers. Since 1998 she has been a documentary film-maker and writer on television projects and documentaries. “Arabic Movie” is her first film.

MY OWN PRIVATE WAR

56 minutes, 2016
Director: Lidija ZELOVIC (Holland, Serbia)
Production: Zelovic Productions (Holland), IKON (Holland)

Born into a Serbian family from Sarajevo which emigrated to the Netherlands at the start of the civil war in Yugoslavia, the film-maker/journalist has followed the conflict and its consequences over many years.
In this film she returns to the country of her birth, using a personal approach to settle scores. She meets a cousin who was a sniper during the war, a journalist who tracked down Ratko Mladic, her relatives who, around a table, talk about the past and present.

Lidija ZELOVIC studied Yugoslav literature at the University of Sarajevo and worked as a TV presenter until the outbreak of war in 1992.
Emigrating to Holland with her family, she studied film at the University of Amsterdam.
From 1996 to 2001 she was a journalist in several countries at war. She then began directing and producing documentaries for Dutch, British and German public television companies.

LA FABULOSA CASABLANCA

80 minutes, 2016
Director: Manuel HORRILLO (Spain)
Production: MLK Producciones (Spain), with the participation of Canal Sur TV (Spain)

“La Fabulosa Casablanca” is a story about nostalgia, glamour – and a certain bitterness – seen through the eyes of Spaniards who, imagining a North African El Dorado, helped create California-on-the-Atlantic, and who were then driven away from it. Using personal memories and testimonies about today’s Casablanca, the film looks at this moment of the 20th century through the mouthpiece of Pedro Casablanc who, like Manuel Horrillo, is from Casablanca, helped by the playwright Cándido Carrasco and actor Jean Reno. We also see rehearsals of a play about the colonial conflict which in 1950-1970 put an end to the convivencia between Europeans and Moroccans.

Manuel HORRILLO
Born in Casablanca en 1959, Manuel HORRILLO is a Spanish documentary director.
He has worked on many feature films as digital special effects supervisor and has twice won a Goya Award for his work.
He also made the documentary “Rif 1921” (2008).

FEDERICA MONTSENY, L’INDOMPTABLE

52 minutes, 2016
Director: Jean-Michel RODRIGO (France)
Production: Marmitafilms (France), with the participation of France Télévisions (France) and France 3 Midi-Pyrénées (France)

A leading anarchist, Federica Montseny was elected minister of Spain’s Second Republic in 1936. During her tenure she tried to establish a universal health care system, dared draft laws on contraception, birth control, the rights of single mothers and prostitutes. She passed a law giving women the right to abortion forty years before Simone Veil in France.
After the Spanish Civil War she took asylum in France, living in Toulouse where she continued unabated her fight for libertarian ideas, “mujeres libres” and education.

Jean-Michel RODRIGO
Fascinated by Indian and mixed-race cultures, Jean-Michel RODRIGO has made several TV reports and documentaries about the Andes, slums and mines. The issues being coca, guerillas, social organizations, resistance. Then he turned his attention to Africa, making “Les greniers de l’argent” about farmers fighting for control over their own lives. At the same time he produced “La Guerre des cotons” which brought to light the injustice of the international economic rules which give a handful of American farmers priority over the survival of twenty million African cotton producers. In the same vein, diving into the vortex of globalization, he made “Le business des fleurs” and “Du sucre et des fleurs dans nos moteurs”.

BERLUSCONI ET LA MAFIA. SCANDALES A L’ITALIENNE

56 minutes, 2015
Director: Olivier TOSCER (France)
Production: Cinétévé (France) with the participation of France 3 (France)

February 1986. The French discover a businessman with a charmer’s smile and unshakable self-assurance: Silvio Berlusconi. In Italy he was already the king of private television. In Paris, the Socialist President François Mitterrand had just given him a concession to run a new private television channel: La Cinq.
But even back then the highly successful Italian billionaire was controversial, suspected of having links with the Sicilian Mafia.
Getting to the heart of the power system and the machinations of money laundering, this film tells how Cosa Nostra’s protection and dirty money hang over the whole length of Berlusconi’s career, since his beginnings in the Milanese property business to his success in politics, by way of his triumph in commercial television.
With a scenario worthy of a thriller and based on first-hand accounts, many from Berlusconi’s close associates as well as some of the best-known anti-Mafia magistrates, the film also shows how Italy’s most powerful man has always managed to slip through the judicial net.

Olivier TOSCER
Born in 1967, Olivier TOSCER has written and directed six documentary films for different channels: in November 2015, “Djihad 2.0” for LCP-Assemblée Nationale; in August 2015, “Berlusconi & la mafia, scandales à l’italienne” for France 3, RTBF, RTS; in September 2013, “Crise grecque: une faillite européenne” shown on France 3’s “Docs Interdits”, was praised by the press; in 2010, after several investigations into the corruption in French Polynesia, he co-directed for Canal Plus his first film: “JPK, l’homme qui faisait trembler Tahiti”; in 2011 for Arte he wrote and directed “Les millions perdus de l’Europe”, a film about corruption in the European Union; in June 2012, for France 2, he co-wrote and directed the first French film about High Frequency Trading: “Finance Folle: l’attaque des robots-traders”.
Olivier TOSCER has also published four books. The first, “Argent public, fortunes privées”, published by Denoël in 2002 then by Folio Documents, is required reading for several university programmes.
Since 1999 he has also worked at L’Obs. Initially running their financial investigations, he now spends most of his time on the issues of terrorism and major crime.

NAPOLISLAM

75 minutes, 2015
Director: Ernesto PAGANO (Italy)
Production : Ladoc (Italy), Isola Film (Italy)

One day Naples wakes up and discovers it has become Islamic. A camera wanders through the city before getting under the skin of ten people who have converted to Islam: an unemployed person, a girl in love, a rapper, a father. A random mix of people, but for each the Koran provides an answer to social injustice, unbridled consumption and a world without hope. But the religion they have chosen is not only a faith, it is a system of rules, with roots in a distant culture. How can one reconcile it with one’s own culture? Between halal pastries and prayers in the street, their daily story sheds new light, alternately amused and bitter, on both Naples and our society.

Ernesto PAGANO was born in 1981. He studied Islam at the Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”.
He is a journalist, Arabic translator and documentary film-maker.
He lived for three years in Cairo working as correspondent for Italian magazines and newspapers, and as an Arabic translator. While there he made a short film about Cairo taxi-drivers called “Cairo Taxi Drivers” (2009), as well as two documentaries: “Nasser mon Amour” (2011) and “Lontano da Tahrir” (2012).
Since his return to Italy he has worked on “Report”, a Rai Tre programme, and conducted investigations for Arte, the National Geographic Channel and La7.

LA GRANJA DEL PAS

82 minutes, 2015
Director: Silvia MUNT (Spain)
Production: Intent Produccions (Spain), Corporació Catalana de Mitjans Audiovisuals (Spain)

Granja del Pas is the building which houses the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) – an advice centre for people unable to repay their mortgage – in Sabadell, a town in north-eastern Spain.
The documentary shows how it operates and the stories of those who work there.
The instability created by the current economic recession affects people’s daily lives. The documentary shows us the deep contradictions in a society which has hit hard times, its need to rethink the future and its intense desire for freedom.

Silvia MUNT is an actress, a stage and film director.
She has acted in more than fifty films and received the Goya Award for her role in “Alas de Mariposa” (1991).
In 1998 she began to make films, among them “Pretextos” (2008) and the documentary “Elena Dimitrievna Dianokova Gala” (2003).
She won a second Goya Award for “Laila” (1999), her first short documentary.
She has written and directed a dozen films for television.

DAESH, PAROLES DE DESERTEURS

52 minutes, 2016
Director: Thomas DANDOIS (France, UK) and François-Xavier TREGAN (France)
Production : Memento (France), Arte (France, Germany)

In south eastern Turkey, a few kilometres from the border with war-torn Syria, a clandestine network courageously smuggles out ISIS fighters who have decided to quit. For the first time deserters agree to talk about their life subjugated to the Islamic State. Mostly they come from Raqqa, the terrorist group’s political and military capital. These testimonies are very rare since most ISIS defectors hide and never speak to the press. If they surrender to their countries’ authorities they are imprisoned and can only communicate with their lawyers or families. The escape network is organised by members of the Free Syrian Army, and they agreed to demonstrate some of their working methods. By helping defectors escape they hope to expose the lies of ISIS, its cult of violence and its corruption. They are convinced this will deter future candidates for jihad and dry up the valuable recruitment channels.

Thomas DANDOIS is a director, reporter and “journaliste reporter d’images”, graduate of the Institut Pratique de Journalisme in Paris. Franco-British, he has made documentaries around the world. His filmography contains about thirty films, including “Aung San Suu Kyi, la liberté en héritage” (2013), shown on France 5, “Mogadiscio, capitale fantôme”, shown in 2011 on Arte, and more than 15 26-minute features for Arte Reportage including “Tunisie, sur le chemin de la démocratie” which won the FIGRA Best Reportage Award in 2012. Also a writer, Thomas has published “En territoire interdit” and several articles, in particular for the prestigious French magazine XXI.

François-Xavier TREGAN is a reporter and director. Having graduated as a historian, he studied at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales de Paris. He lived in Damascus from 1992 to 1998. Special correspondent in the Yemen for Le Monde from 2011 to 2015, François-Xavier also produces the radio documentary programme Sur les Docks on France Culture. He collaborates with many media such as XXI, L’Express, L’Obs, GEO, Radio Canada, etc. Among his latest films broadcast on Arte: “Roméo et Juliette, un amour de guerre”, shown in 2015, and “Au Yémen, dans les couloirs de la mort” shown in 2014.

AUBE DORÉE, UNE AFFAIRE PERSONNELLE

90 minutes, 2015
Director: Angélique KOUROUNIS (France, Greece)
Production: OmniaTV (Greece), Arte (France, Germany), Yemaya Productions (France)

“My man is a Jew, one of my sons gay, another an anarchist and me a left-wing feminist, daughter of an immigrant. If Golden Dawn comes to power, our only problem will be which carriage we get into.”
Over a period of years the journalist/director has investigated Golden Dawn, the Greek neo-Nazi party. In this film she approaches the issue through her own obsessions, worries and fears. She has spent many years researching all aspects of the party, still ranked third on the Greek political scene, despite decades of murderous actions.

Angélique Kourounis

Angélique KOUROUNIS is a journalist, author and director.
Since 1985 she has covered Greece and the Balkans on a regular, often daily basis for the written press (including, Charlie Hebdo, La Libre Belgique, Politis and Ouest France), radio (France ​Info, France Culture, France Inter, Radio Canada, RTBF Radio Télévision Belge Francophone, Radio Suisse Romande), and television (LCI, CBC, RTSR, RTBF, Public Sénat, TV5 Monde).
Among her most recent reports: “Attrape-moi si tu peux”, “Va te faire sauter chez les Grecs”, “Les mutants de l’atome” and “La Route des Roms”.