2021

Najla is still living in her childhood: the last images in her memory are 8 years old. War, childhood, and passion for cinema, all these phases are mixed in her heart and brain. Nothing can awaken them except Ziad who takes care of her and who decides to use cinema in order to let her memorise and remember one of the turning points in her life: her holy communion.

1956. Algeria is a French colony. Fernand and Helene are madly in love. Fernand is an activist, fighting for independence alongside the Algerians. Helene is fighting for Fernand’s life. History will irrevocably change the course of their destiny.

After 62 years of living together, Lina’s grandparents, Aïcha and Mabrouk, have decided to separate. Together, they came from Algeria to Thiers, a small medieval town in the middle of France, over 60 years ago. Side by side, they have experienced this chaotic immigrant life. For Lina, their separation is an opportunity to question their long journey of exile and their silence.

Narrated by Ahmed, the author, “The Fifth Story” is a long emotional journey spanning four decades of wars and conflicts in Iraq.

Two Syrian directors in Za’atari Refugee Camp, Jordan and two Indigenous Shipibo-Conibo directors in Lima, Peru correspond through film diaries in a cross-border project from Another Kind of Girl Collective.

After her mother has a bad dream, Nesrine travels from Cairo, where she has lived since 2002, to her hometown Tima in Upper Egypt, in an attempt to save their old home. The filmmaker takes us back and forth between two worlds, belonging to neither. She struggles with the idea of selling the house, as it holds the last memories from her beloved father. She tries to clean it and do the needed repairs in vain as the wreckage is beyond repair. She finds some old tapes recorded by her father, some notes and an ambush of memories.

Born to an Algerian father and a Sicilian mother in Tunisia, I have always been a child of three cultures. This motherland is where my Algerian ancestors were born when it was called Ifriqiya. It is also home to my Sicilian grandparents whose parents were part of the important migration flux of the beginning of the last century. A workforce by the thousands reached the shores of this “Promised Land”.

After years of separation, the filmmaker renews her relationship with her mother, Aïcha, now suffering from Alzheimer's. From Brussels to Tangiers, the odyssey of a family marked by exile is evoked through discretion and confession, pain, separation, grief, and joy.

Recently settled with his partner and son in a Reims suburb, Gevar, who has arrived from Syria, has decided to invest in the rental of a small patch of land to grow vegetables. Filmmaker Qutaiba Barhamji films them over four seasons as they settle on this new ground that often rebels against the couple’s hopes.