Ashes

13 novembre, nos vies en éclats

2025 · ★ 8

On November 13, 2015, the attacks in Paris and Saint-Denis, carried out by three Islamist commandos and claimed by ISIS, were the deadliest in France since the end of World War II. In the months that followed, the November 13 Program was launched by the CNRS and Inserm to study the construction of individual and collective memory around an event that profoundly marked French society. Today, the testimonies of 27 volunteers—among some 1,000 people—who participated in the study form a mosaic of experiences that shows how trauma extends beyond the immediate circle to permeate the national collective memory.

J’ai quitté l’Aquitaine

2006

A filmmaker confined to a psychiatric institution tries to find healing by bringing together all the members of his family for a collective experiment: using a construction game set, they must try to recreate as precisely as possible the happiness that once filled their family home, which disappeared 25 years ago. If even one family member managed to restore everything perfectly, the patient would be cured - that much is certain. But nothing was ever going to go as planned.

Starting Place

1994 · ★ 7

In this film from late in his career, Kramer returns to Hanoi after nearly 25 years to re-envision the city’s struggle through an uncertain and daunting past, present, and future. The Vietnamese characters in the film are diverse: Kramer’s former guide from an earlier visit in 1969; a tight-rope walker in the national circus; a man who took photos of B-52s and another who lost his fingers shooting them down.

Paysans cinéastes

2023 · ★ 6

Farmers in the Île-de-France region, they filmed life on the farm, working in the fields, and family and village celebrations on 8 mm or Super 8 film. From the 1950s to the 1980s, these testimonies unfold a history of rural life: we move away from a peasant and family model to industrial agriculture for export. Through these family images, I attempt to answer my own questions about our agricultural future. In the 1950s, the land of Île-de-France fed us.

Idak-Idak-Idak

2025

Idak-Idak-Idak is a hybrid-documentary relating the stolen Lombok Treasures with the Sasak diaspora through three generations of women: a daughter, her mother, and her grandmother. Blending full-spectrum cinematography with personal footage, this film moves between Indonesia and the Netherlands to examine colonial legacies, displacement and healing the heart of home. In Sasak, "Idak" can be interpreted as both “heart” and “absence”, becoming a container for memory, loss, and the unseen layers of the self between generations.

Butch Jamie

2008 · ★ 3.9

The film follows the story of Jamie, a struggling butch lesbian actress who gets cast as a man in a film. The main plot is a romantic comedy between Jamie's male alter-ego, "Male Jamie," and Jill, a heterosexual woman on set. The film's subplots include Jamie's bisexual roommate Lola and her cat actor Howard, Lola's abrasive butch German girlfriend Andi, and Jamie's gay Asian friend David.

Aleph

2021 · ★ 7.3

Structured as a labyrinth-like game and inspired by Jorge Luis Borges, Aleph is a travelogue of experience, a dreamer's journey through the lives, experiences, stories and musings of protagonists spanning ten countries and five continents.

A Place of Absence

2025

This poetic film follows director Marialuisa's journey with Anita and Leticia, Central American women traveling with the Caravan of Mothers of Missing Migrants.

What Has Been Lost

2020 · ★ 4

My mother has died. Her name was Maria. Her children, we, Raúl and Santiago, discover among the objects left by our mother hundreds of photographs from our maternal grandfather, from REGINA -our great-aunt-, from our mother, from our father... And through those photographs, and with the help from an old camera -my grandfather's inheritance-, I, -along several trips to the places where those photographs were taken-, seek to recover and not lose my memory... that of my family. In the end, we will have to think on our memory and on what we have preserved and lost.

Stone Street

2012

Stone Street documents the life and experiences of a Trinidadian diaspora family and their enduring connection to the long standing family home in Port of Spain. Through the intersecting journeys of this extended and extensive family, the filmmaker explores themes of home, belonging and identity in a life defined by the fragmentary nature of a migratory Caribbean culture. This experimental documentary combines a lyrical first person voice with a family archive of home made audio visual artifacts, interviews and events. As the documentary explores the fragmentary nature of Caribbean identity, it simultaneously celebrates the fragments of domestic memorializing found in home movies, videos and photographs. Stone Street uses these various forms to evoke the experience of a complex and diverse Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora identity.

Good Grief?

2022

Reverend Richard Coles opens up the conversation around bereavement, as he goes on a personal grief voyage and tries some unconventional activities that have helped others to live with loss

The Place of Chimeras

An elegy about ‘José Ð Almeida’s life and work. Along an intimate metamorphosis, this dreamlike and visually expressive world created by the visionary and insane dreamer is recreated and performed between a symbiosis of moving image, photography and painting- in a scenic, dramatic, symbolic and mystical tone.