MALTA, IN THE NAME OF DAPHNE

56 minutes, 2021
Director : Jules GIRAUDAT (France)
Production : Forbidden Films (France)

On October 16th 2017 Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered in a car bomb attack. Her three sons are convinced it was a political assassination. Their mother was investigating the corruption of individuals close to the Prime Minister. Since that day they have been fighting tirelessly to find those responsible for her murder. In their quest for the truth, they have been joined by a team of international journalists. The film is the story of their fight to obtain justice against a mafia state.

Jules Giraudat is an investigative journalist and documentary film-maker. From 2017 to 2019 he was editor-in-chief of Forbidden Stories which won the Special Award of the 2019 European Press Awards. He coordinated the work of the 45 journalists of the “Daphne” project, the “Green Blood” project and participated in the “Frontière Mortelle” project. Investigations which have taken him to work in Colombia, Tanzania, India and Malta to continue the work of journalists who are threatened, imprisoned or murdered.

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GEMMA HAS A PLAN

61 minutes, 2021
Director : Arantza DIEZ (Spain)
Production : Televisió de Catalunya-CCMA SA (Spain)

Gemma, a Catalan nurse in her sixties, decided to disobey the law. Illegally she helps asylum seekers stranded in Greece and Serbia cross the borders along the Balkan route so they can get to the countries where they want to settle. She drives them in her car. They use Spanish identity cards lent by friends. With their help Gemma has managed to build an international network of activists. They support her in what she’s doing. She succeeds every time – until bad luck turns everything upside down: she finds herself in a Serbian prison, accused of human trafficking. Her lawyer has to prove that smuggling people in the name of solidarity can’t be considered a crime.

Arantza DIEZ is a documentary film-maker born in Barcelona in 1975. She has worked as a journalist and independent film-maker for 15 years. She began following the refugee crisis in 2015 on the Greek island of Lesbos, where she filmed a Spanish rescue team who had settled on the island helping refugees get ashore safely. Since then she has mainly focused on depicting migration issues across Europe, either filming on board a rescue ship off the Libyan coast or following people determined to challenge the fortress that Europe has become. Gemma has a plan took three and a half years to film, from 2016 to 2020. It explores Europeans’ rights to disobey decisions and rules which go against ethical and human values.

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MICROBIOME

26 minutes, 2021
Director : Stavros PETROPOULOS (Greece)
Production : CLEO – Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Outcomes Research (Greece), Alaska Films (Greece)

A group of scientists is trying to unlock the secret of the longevity of people living on the island of Ikaria. They follow them, watching their daily routines in a closed world – kitchen, garden, workplace, their secret places. The researchers are going to ask them some rather personal questions…..

Having completed the first cycle of his studies in sociology at the University of Crète at Rethymno (Greece), Stavros PETROPOULOS graduated with a Masters in Media and Communication from Goldsmiths College, London University in 2008. Since returning to Greece he has lived and worked in Athens as a director and producer of a wide range of audiovisual works. In 2014, he co-founded Alaska Films, a production company specializing in video productions within the arts and advertising industries. His documentaries I am a dancer (2016) and Homes (2018) have been screened at many film festivals across Greece, including the 17th, 19th and 21st Thessaloniki Documentary Festivals.

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LA PROVA

27 minutes, 2021
Director : Toni ISABELLA VALENZI (Switzerland, Italy)
Production : Médiadiffusion – IAD (Belgium)

In Southern Italy Rosa and Peppe face up to the passing of time. They are growing old together, and bringing up a pig.

Toni ISABELLA VALENZI is of Italian descent, but was born and raised in Switzerland. He was first a graphic designer before leaving Geneva in 2016 to study directing in Belgium. He completed his studies at the Institut des Arts de Diffusion (IAD) with his documentary La Prova. Since then he has been preparing a short drama film between Brussels and Geneva

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GRANNY’SEXUAL LIFE

13 minutes, 2021
Director : Urška DJUKIĆ (Slovenia) and Émilie PIGEARD (France)
Production : Studio Virc (Slovenia), Olivier Catherin (France), Ikki Films(France)

Four elderly women reminisce about when they were young and how relationships between men and women were different in those days. Their voices merge into one, grandmother Vera’s, who tells her story in great detail. A return to her youth, where the memories of her intimate life illustrate the status of Slovenian women in the first half of the 20th century.

Born in 1986, Urška DJUKIĆ studied at the Academy of Arts in Nova Gorica. Her short film Bon Appétit, La Vie! won Best Short Film at the 2016 Slovenian National Film Festival. She was selected for the Cinéfondation’s 39th residency, where she developed her first film Little Trouble Girls. In 2021 she continued working on this film within Torino Film Lab. Émilie PIGEARD was born in 1990 in France. After a year at the Sorbonne she entered the prestigious École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, where she specialized in Animation. Since then she has been making freelance films in Paris, while continuing to draw and lead workshops for children.

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ANGLE MORT

(Blind spot)

13 minutes, 2021
Director : Lotfi ACHOUR (Tunisia)
Production : La Luna Productions (France), A.P.A. Artistes Producteurs Associés (Tunisia)

On October 7th 1991, during Ben Ali’s dictatorship in Tunisia, a man was kidnapped. He was tortured, killed and then disappears, his body has never been found. Nearly 30 years later he comes back to speak to us. Calm, almost cold, surgical, without dramatising, he looks at facts, people, places, time – and their confusion in his memory, strongly reviving ours. It brings us back to the surface, what we have voluntarily or involuntarily decided to bury, to repress from our collective history. He takes us with him in the twists and turns of this memory, making his mother’s question his own: “Where did you put my son’s body?”

Theatre and film director, Lotfi ACHOUR has staged more than 25 theatrical creations including Macbeth created for the World Shakespeare Festival for the London Olympics and produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company. In the cinema he has directed 3 short films selected by more than 200 festivals. He has won more than 80 awards around the world. “La Laine sur le dos” was selected in the Official Competition of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. He directed “Demain dès l’Aube”, a feature film selected for the official competition of the 2016 JCC, in New York, Beirut, at Cinemed, in Durban, Lausanne, Geneva and Paris, among others.

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THE OTHER SIDE OF THE RIVER

91 minutes, 2021
Director : Antonia KILIAN (Germany)
Production : Doppelplusultra Filmproduktion GmbH (Germany), Pink Shadow Films (Germany)

Hala, 19, crossed the Euphrates to escape both a forced marriage and her family, supporters of the Islamic State. She found refuge in a military academy where she was trained in the use of weapons to free other women in danger. After the Kurdish army re-captured her home town from ISIS she returned there to free her sisters from her parents’ house.

Antonia KILIAN est une réalisatrice, une directrice de la photographie et une productrice. Elle a étudié la Communication visuelle ainsi que l’Art et les médias à l’université des Arts de Berlin et la Cinématographie à l’université du Cinéma de Potsdam Babelsberg et à l’ISA de La Havane, à Cuba. Pendant cette période, elle a travaillé comme directrice de la photographie pour plusieurs films, tant de fiction que documentaires, qui ont été présentés dans de nombreux festivals internationaux. Elle a réalisé le court-métrage documentaire “Silent Night” sur les attaques racistes contre les migrants en Allemagne, qui a remporté le prix Willi-Münzenberg pour la solidarité radicale.

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ETERNAL SENTINEL

62 minutes, 2021
Director : Maryam ASHRAFI (UK, Iran)
Production : Ilha Productions (France)

If Maryam had not been in Tabqa that day, accompanied by the Arab 24 film-crew to interview Adwan Hamza Ali, would he have stepped on that mine and been killed? She reworks this question over and over again in her mind. It reminds her of why she fled Iran, her homeland. To overcome her trauma, Maryam talks to other journalists around the world, witnesses or victims of the same “sentinels” – these lethal incidents triggered by mines or improvised explosive devices. Despite the defeat of Isis these incidents have increased tenfold, the last scars of a caliphate with multiple fractures. Through various testimonies, Maryam offers a reflection on a profession-passion, the wounds it can leave and above all, how to heal them.

Maryam ASHRAFI is an Iranian photographer and director based in Paris. Born in Tehran in 1982, she graduated with a BA in Documentary Photography from the University of Wales. Her work explores different subjects: refugees in Paris, the mobilization of the Kurdish and Iranian diasporas and the Indignados Movement. In 2018, Maryam was DoP on the documentary I Am The Revolution (first shown at DOC NYC). As a freelance photographer she covered the aftermath of the wars in northern Syria, from Kobané to Sinjar until 2018. Her work on Kurdish resistance movements has been the subject of several exhibitions and publications, notably in The Guardian.

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CAIN’S CHILDREN

68 minutes, 2021
Director : Keti STAMO (Albania)
Production : MARGO Cinema (France), ANIMA PICTURES (Albania), YOUNG FILMS PRODUCTIONS (Italy), in collaboration with RAI Cinema and under the patronage of Amnesty International Italy

“Cain’s children” takes place in a small village in northern Albania. Here time has stood still, and the strict rules of an ancient code (Kanun) dictate the life and death of the inhabitants.

Born in Tirana in 1982, Keti STAMO is a scriptwriter and film-maker educated in Italy and Switzerland. Having obtained a degree in Psychology and a Masters in Criminology, she studied the relationship between psychology and cinema. Subsequently she worked with several NGO’s to promote education through the arts. Employed by Amnesty International, she creates dream workshops in refugee camps in Greece. With actor Ashraf BARHOM, she works on different aspects of migration, building psychodrama techniques with groups of Syrian children stuck in the camps. The Children of Cain is her first feature film.

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KASH KASH

90 minutes, 2022
Director : Lea NAJJAR (Germany, Libanon)
Production : FFL Film – Fernseh-Labor Ludwigsburg GmbH & Co. KG (Germany), in coproduction with Doha Film Institute (Qatar)

Above Beirut flies an unexpected bearer of hope: the pigeon. Young people play a game called “Kash Hamam” with them. During the recent catastrophic political collapse, the director takes us up onto the rooftops to meet three players of this game and a young girl. She desperately wants to join the group.

Lea NAJJAR, was born in 1994 in Vienna, grew up in Beirut and obtained her high school diploma at the City International School and then her first-year diploma in 2013 at the American University of Beirut. During her student years she worked as a press photographer. From 2014 she studied at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg and shot Kash Kash in 2021, her graduation film and first feature.

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