Selection 2021 Archives - Page 2 of 3

THERE IS NO OTHER PLACE

73 minutes, 2021
Director : Anat TEL (Israel)
Production : Anat TEL (Israel), Ventana Film (Germany)

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem’s Old City, the most sacred place in Christendom, is shared between many different religious communities: Orthodox, Catholic, Armenian, Copt, Syrian and Ethiopian. They try to maintain the old, fragile status quo of these places. Two Muslim families hold the key to the church, each claiming the right to be the keeper of this historic key. As for Johnny, an Israeli police officer, he’s responsible for keeping the peace at the Holy Sepulchre.

Anat TEL graduated in film from Tel Aviv University. She began her career in 2005 as a producer for Channel 8. She has worked as a scriptwriter and assistant director on series, films and commercials. Since 2010, she has also been a teacher and produces documentaries and news reports for television and the Internet. She has the following films to her credit: “Phoenix” (2018), “Palestine.net” (2016), “Mom, Dad, I’m Muslim” (2012) and “I’m not Filipina” (2010)

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PESCAMARE

61 minutes, 2019
Director : Andrea LODOVICHETTI (Italy)
Production : Lobecafilm (Italy)

A tradition shared for generations, respect for the sea, human fear and its challenges, survive to eat and trade. Nothing is created, nothing destroyed, everything is transformed.
Ports in small towns, like Fano, are different. Over the years they have changed, often profoundly. But they remain rich, rich with a varied, indefatigable humanity, and with a multi-ethnic wealth. The atmosphere surrounding today’s maritime world has remained almost unchanged and flourishes proudly in the large and small towns which live off the sea. Traditions won’t die, neither will those gravelly voices and broad accents of the “oldies” with whom we grew up. They’re still working today with the same determination as in the past.

Since 2013 Andrea LODOVICHETTI, graduate in film directing at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, has lived between Europe and the United States. Director, screenwriter and producer, he was assistant to Oscar-winning director Paolo Sorrentino for the films “l’Amico di famiglia” and “ll Divo”. From 2002 to today, Andrea’s films have received more than 50 awards and special mentions, including the Italian Golden Globe and the Looking for Genius Award (Babelgum Film Fest) at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.

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AMORI

60 minutes, 2020
Director : Stefano CECCARELLI (Italy) et Gabriele ANASTASIO (Italy)
Production : Laboratorio di Cinema Gabriele Anastasio (Italy), Stefano Ceccarelli (Italy), Regione Umbria (Italy)

Amori opens with a tribute to Pasolini and his film “Comizi d’amore”, in which, microphone in hand, the film-maker was already questioning Italians of the 1960’s about their sexual mores and their experiences of intimate relationships.
Amori takes us on a journey exploring the many facets of contemporary love. The abiding feeling is also the most unfathomable, to the point where a single voice is not enough to describe it. A documentary about love, about those who love and who are loved.

Stefano CECCARELLI was born in 1982 in Fano, Italy. Since 2012 he has lived in Perugia. He began to frequent the Laboratorio di Cinema Gabriele Anastasio and then to collaborate there. First as cameraman and as editor, he now specializes in directing.

Gabriele ANASTASIO was born in 1959 in Castellammare di Stabia. For several years he has lived in Perugia where he works in the field of theatre and cinema. In 2001 he founded the Laboratorio di Cinema Gabriele Anastasio in Perugia.

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AGALMA

54 minutes, 2020
Director : Doriana MONACO (Italy)
Production : Parallelo 41 Produzioni (Italy), Ladoc (Italy)

“Agalma” reveals the daily life of the Archaeological Museum of Naples — its facilities, restorations and the expressive power of its classical statues. The film shows us the passion of the restorers and curators who plan the museum’s life. In the illusory stillness of the great Bourbon building, this whirlwind of activity breathes new life into statues, frescoes and mosaics.

Doriana MONACO was born in Benevento in 1989. She studied archaeology and art history at the University of Naples Federico II. In 2014, she worked as assistant director on the film “Perez” by Edoardo De Angelis. She made her first two short films in 2015: “Anatomia di un pensiero Sad” and “Lazyest Girl in Town”. In 2016 she joined FILMaP – Atelier di Cinema del Reale at Ponticelli, where she directed the documentary “Cronopios”, selected for the 2017 Trieste Film Festival’s Corso Salani Award.

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THERE IS STILL SOMEONE IN THE WOODS

52 minutes, 2020
Director : Erol ILERI LLORDELLA (Spain)
Production : Cultura i Conflicte (Spain), Bonobo Films (Spain)
With the collaboration of TV3 Televisió de Catalunya (Spain)

Lejla Damon is a 25-year-old woman full of life. She grew up in a middle class family in London. Her parents, journalists, covered the Bosnian War for Sky News. In December 1992, while filming in a bombed Sarajevo hospital, they saw a woman trying to drown her newborn baby. Conceived through rape, the child was considered the seed of the enemy.
During the Balkan War, between 25,000 and 50,000 women were victims of sexual violence. There’s no official figure because many victims either didn’t survive or still live in silence.
Lejla, Alen, Ajna were born as a result of war rape. 25 years later they join other survivors in their struggle to break the silence and overcome stigma. For these victims, has the war ever ended?

Erol ILERI LLORDELLA graduated in music production from the Amsterdam School of Audio Engineering. He is a senior technician in audiovisual productions and stage shows, and was in charge of the audiovisual content for the NGO Agermanament. He combines the work of audiovisual producer and music producer in the Bonobo Films Cooperative, where he has been producing audiovisual content for the past five years in advertising, theatre, social reporting and documentaries.

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THE SILENT GENERATION

61 minutes, 2020
Director : Ferran NAVARRO-BELTRAN (Spain)
Production : Amoros Producciones (Spain)

This documentary is a tribute to Barcelona’s elderly LGBTQI, to the “Silent Generation” forced to remain hidden, to the movement’s pioneers as well as to those who have remained anonymous. A collection of testimonies where those concerned talk about the powerful events and moments which have marked their life: religious education, the repression of the Franco dictatorship, the birth of democracy, the first LGTBQI associations, the fight against AIDS and legalisation same-sex marriage.

Ferran Navarro-Beltran is a film-maker and graphic designer from Barcelona. He has been working as a freelance designer for 8 years. His two short films, “The Orchid” and “Forget-Me-Not” have been selected at over 60 international festivals.

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POSTWAR ALBUM

75 minutes, 2020
Director : Angel LEIRO (Spain) et Airy MARAGALL (Spain)
Production : Lukimedia (Spain)
In coproduction with ZDF (Germany)
In collaboration with Arte (Germany, France)

Spanish war photographer Gervasio Sánchez documented the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990’s. Images of barricaded streets, walls riddled with bullet holes, burnt cars, and in the midst of it all, people continuing to go about their daily lives while fighting or mourning their dead. Children are often at the centre of these photographs, playing among the ruins. Gervasio has kept in touch with some of them and met them again for the first time in Sarajevo 25 years after the end of the siege. Some are amazed when they see his photographs because they don’t have pictures from that time. Hard hit by the war, these people look back at their childhood with nostalgia and affection.

Angel Leiro has been a television and film director for over thirty years. He started working at Televisión Española, and in 1984 joined Televisió de Catalunya. His feature-length documentary “Portraits of the soul” is about photojournalist Sandra Balsells returning to the Balkans to see the people she photographed during the war there.

Airy Maragall has a Masters in Screenwriting from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and has been working in the audiovisual sector since 1991. She writes screenplays for films, documentaries and television series, as well as for various television programmes in Spain and Argentina. She lived in Sarajevo for ten months in the immediate post-war period.

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LES OUBLIÉS DE L’ESPAGNE

(Spain’s Forgotten People)

52 minutes, 2020
Director : Xavier ViLLETARD (France)
Production : Les Films du Sillage (France), France 3 Corse ViaStella
In coproduction with Playtime Films (Belgium), RTBF (Belgium)

On October 24^th 2019, Francisco Franco’s coffin left the specially built mausoleum in the Valle of Los Caídos (the Valley of the fallen) where he had been buried since 1975. He left behind an architectural work to the glory of National Catholicism – and the country’s largest mass grave, containing nearly 30,000 bodies. The majority had been fighters from the Franco camp, the remaining third from the Republican camp. This division between the dead of the opposing camps was supposed to symbolize the great project of national reconciliation to extinguish the fire of the civil war. But in the country’s current political context the exhumation of Franco, while a powerful gesture, does not solve all the problems. People who ask to recover the bodies of their parents or grandparents buried in the basilica’s crypt 70 years ago, or who want to excavate the mass graves which still cover the country, are often ignored. Spain continues to pay for a complicated past which it wanted to put behind it. At the risk of provoking outcry from all those ignored by the transition to democracy.

From 1982 to 1988 a press and television journalist (Liberation, the programme “Cinéma, Cinémas”), Xavier Villetardmoved to the film-making with a short documentary about David Lynch. From his subsequent filmography three main themes emerge:
The first is about Russia, with films like “Forever Lenin” or “The Russian Campaign”. The second focuses on women, both remarkable (Edith Piaf, Frida Kahlo, Oum Kalthoum) and anonymous (“Les Filles des Ruines”, “Les Femmes de la Liberation”). The third theme looks at the intellectual adventures of the twentieth century at the crossroads of culture and history such as “Beat Generation” (Award for Best Cinematic Essay at the 2014 Montreal International Festival of Films on Art – FIFA), and “André Malraux, the ordeal of power” made in 2017.
He has more than 20 documentary films to his credit and works regularly with France Télévisions and Arte France.

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MADE IN FRANCE – AU SERVICE DE LA GUERRE

52 minutes, 2020
Director : Sophie NIVELLE-CARDINALE (France) and Alice ODIOT (France)
Production : Les Films du Tambour de Soie (France), Bonne Pioche Télévision (France), Arte (Germany, France), Stenola Productions (Belgium), RTBF (Belgium)
With the participation of Public Sénat (France)
In coproduction avec Shelter Prod (Belgium)

On July 17^th 2014, during Operation Protective Edge, an Israeli drone targeted a house in a working-class district of Gaza. Three children playing on the roof, Wassim, Afnan and Jihad, were killed, their bodies riddled with shrapnel from a missile. Commissioned by the NGO Al Mezan to collect evidence of war crimes committed during the offensive, Palestinian investigator Yamin al-Madhoun found a small piece of metal among the debris. On it is written “Paris, France” plus the name of a French company.
For the first time a legal link could be established between a war crime and a French industrialist. The exhibit allows the parents of the dead children to start proceedings against a manufacturer of war material.

As an experienced reporter, Sophie NIVELLE-CARDINALE has been covering conflicts in the Middle East for several years. In 2011 she was one of the first journalists to enter Syria illegally. Her reporting showed the incredible brutality of the Syrian regime’s repression. Her work has won the Bayeux War Correspondents Award (2013), the Albert Londres Award and the SCAM Stars (2016). In 2017 hers was the first foreign television crew to enter Raqqa with the Kurdish forces who took back the city from the Islamic State (“La Bataille de l’Euphrate”, Arte 2017). She continues to produce news reports and documentaries about the conflicts in the Middle East today.

Alice ODIOT is a French journalist and director born in 1976. She won the Albert Londres Award in 2012 for her film “Zambia, who profits from copper”. Her films explore the world of work, the excesses of capitalism and the prison environment. Among her documentaries: “Jusqu’à ce que la mort nous sépare” (2015), “Le mauvais œil” (2015) and “Des hommes” (2019, co-directed with Jean-Robert Viallet).

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L’ÉCOLE DE L’ESPOIR

(School of Hope)

78 minutes, 2020
Director : Mohamed EL ABOUDI (Morocco, Finland)
Production : Illume (Finland), Bellota Films (France), Vulcan Productions (USA), La Prod (Morocco)
With the participation ofFrance Télévisions, YLE (Finland)
In coproduction with 2M (Morocco)

Set in Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains, the film shows the children of a nomadic tribe, the Oulad Boukais. Over the past 15 years, climate change and overexploitation have forced these nomads to settle down, causing great poverty. On the edge of the desert the tribe nevertheless decided to fight, remaining on its land and educating its children in a small school far from everything, without water or electricity. The film tells the story of this school and the families who built it.

Mohamed EL ABOUDI was born and grew up in Morocco. He has a BA in Drama from the University of Fez (1991) and a Masters in Film and Television from Bond University, Australia (1997). Mohamed’s films show life stories: he has made documentaries about asylum seekers, immigrant mothers, artists, and a young girl with Down’s syndrome. His films have been shown in several festivals around the world. His documentary “Dance of Outlaws” won the 2013 PriMed’s Mediterranean Issues Award.

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