Den Pobedy: Victory Day

"Den Pobedy" (Victory Day) is counted among the most important celebrations for many former Soviet Republics. It is held on May 9 and commemorates the victory of the USSR over Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945). This day pays homage to the war veterans and to the over 26 million Soviets who lost their lives fighting this war. Kalinichenko Vasily Porfirievich fought in the Red Army on the 3rd Ukrainian Front and on the 1st Belarusian Front. As a member of the 226th Infantry Regiment he entered Berlin on April 22, 1945. This documentary explores the war, his life and his family story.

It's Not A Picture, It's A Video.

A fragmented look into the memories of two strangers from the same hometown, brought together through a university project.

Dawn of the Damned

This excellent feature-length documentary - the story of the imperialist colonization of Africa - is a film about death. Its most shocking sequences derive from the captured French film archives in Algeria containing - unbelievably - masses of French-shot documentary footage of their tortures, massacres and executions of Algerians. The real death of children, passers-by, resistance fighters, one after the other, becomes unbearable. Rather than be blatant propaganda, the film convinces entirely by its visual evidence, constituting an object lesson for revolutionary cinema.

Sawt Echaâb

“La Voix du Peuple,” composed of archival photographs by René Vauthier and others, exposes the root causes of the armed conflict of the Algerian resistance. Participating in a war of real images against French colonial propaganda, these images aimed to show the images that the occupier had censored or distorted, by showing the extortions of the French occupation army: torture, arrests and arbitrary executions, napalm bombings, roundabout fires, erasing entire villages from the map, etc. This is what the French media described as a “pacification campaign”.

Emergency: The Living Theatre

a 32-minute color film by Gwen Brown, featuring precious footage of Living Theatre productions “Mysteries” and smaller pieces, “Paradise Now” and “Frankenstein.” “The fusion of Brown’s freewheeling direct cinema and the Living Theatre’s performance for revolutionary change (amidst the heydays of both) unite as a dynamic concoction of the era, yielding for the viewer a shifting terrain of both critical insight and ecstatic zeal, not as a vacant nostalgia for a pre-commodified radicality, but as tactical inspiration for future days.” – Andrew Wilson (Artist’s Access Television)

Las Preguntas que Perdimos

Swinging Light

An experience of a camera swinging in different gestures facing the optical distortion of the Sun. The last appearance of the smudge.

EXILE

An immigrant's last attempt to restore childhood innocence on strange lands.

Be Water

In 1971, after being rejected by Hollywood, Bruce Lee returned to his parents’ homeland of Hong Kong to complete four iconic films. Charting his struggles between two worlds, this portrait explores questions of identity and representation through the use of rare archival footage, interviews with loved ones and Bruce’s own writings.

A Propos D'Un Crime

In 1967, Visconti came to Algiers for the filming of The Stranger with Mastroianni and Anna Karina. Camus, during his lifetime, had always refused to allow one of his novels to be brought to the screen. His family made another decision. The filming of the film was experienced in Algiers, like a posthumous return of the writer to Algiers. During filming, a young filmmaker specializing in documentaries Gérard Patris attempts a report on the impact of the filming of The Stranger on the Algerians. Interspersed with sequences from the shooting of Visconti's film, he films Poncet, Maisonseul, Bénisti and Sénac, friends of Camus, in full discussions to situate Camus and his work in a sociological and historical context. “The idea is for us to show people, others, ourselves as if they could all be Meursault, or at least the witnesses concerned to his drama.”

Colonial Times

Three centuries of Venezuela's history as a Spanish colony are considered from economic, political and social standpoints; evocations of the past are compared to the present. Based on the ideas and research of Federico Brito Figueroa, Alfredo A. Alfonso, Miguel A. Saignes, Josefina Jordan, and Thaelman Urgelles among others.

CHoosing at Twenty

Between 1954-1962, one hundred to three hundred young French people refused to participate in the Algerian war. These rebels, soldiers or conscripts were non-violent or anti-colonialists. Some took refuge in Switzerland where Swiss citizens came to their aid, while in France they were condemned as traitors to the country. In 1962, a few months after Independence, Villi Hermann went to a region devastated by war near the Algerian-Moroccan border, to help rebuild a school. In 2016 he returned to Algeria and reunited with his former students. He also met French refractories, now living in France or Switzerland.

Afrique 50

The first French anti-colonialist film, derived from an assignment in which the director was to document educational activities by the French League of Schooling in West Africa. Vautier later filmed what he actually saw: “a lack of teachers and doctors, the crimes committed by the French Army in the name of France, the instrumentalization of the colonized peoples.” For his role in the film, Vautier was imprisoned for several months. The film was banned from public screening for more than 40 years.

Guerre aux images en Algérie

Muñiz, The Argentinian In The Algerian Revolution

Roberto Muniz, nicknamed "Mahmoud the Argentinian," was a revolutionary fighter who joined the National Liberation Army in 1959 to support the Algerian cause in the war of independence against France. He joined a clandestine group that manufactured weapons and ammunition to be transported to Algeria to support the revolution that began in 1954. After the war, the Algerian government invited the mujahid to stay, an offer he accepted to begin a new life as an employee of Sonnelgaz and a member of the General Union of Algerian Workers (UGTA), accompanied by his wife Alfonsa, a textile union activist who came from Argentina to join this North African adventure.

They Joined the Front

In this film, four key witnesses, who live in Algeria today, as full-fledged Agerians, show us what this colonization was really like, so "beneficial" that they themselves perceived it as the oppression of one people by another. Three of them, who today would be called "pieds noirs," in other words, those Europeans to whom France, the occupying power, gave the best land, taken from the indigenous populations, work, and exclusive rights, not shared by the entire population, lived rather well compared to the majority of the "natives." The fourth was far from all that and lived in Argentina. Annie Steiner, Felix Colozzi, Pierre Chaulet, and Roberto Muniz explain to us what led them to show solidarity with the struggle of the weak, the humiliated, and to risk their freedom and their lives by committing to liberate Algeria.

The Raspberry Reich

Gudrun has modeled her amateur German terrorist group after the 1970s Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof Gang). She attempts to imitate her heroes by kidnapping the son of a wealthy industrialist and hopes to negotiate leftist demands from the father. When Gudrun’s not spouting leftist verses (including during a hilariously brilliant fuck session), she’s trying to convince her all-male gang to abandon their heterosexuality, which she believes is the result of mass delusion.

Frantz Fanon, trajectoire d'un révolté

Frantz Fanon alone embodies all the issues of French colonial history. Martinican resistance fighter, he enlisted, like millions of colonial soldiers, in the Free Army out of loyalty to France and the idea of freedom that it embodies for him. A writer, he participated in the bubbling life of Saint-Germain with Césaire, Senghor and Sartre, debating tirelessly on the destiny of colonized peoples. As a doctor, he revolutionized the practice of psychiatry, seeking in the relations of domination of colonial societies the foundations of the pathologies of his patients in Blida. Activist, he brings together through his action and his history of him, the anger of peoples crushed by centuries of colonial oppression. But beyond this exceptional journey which makes sensitive the permanence of French colonialism in the Lesser Antilles at the gates of the Algerian desert, he leaves an incomparable body of work which has made him today one of the most studied French authors across the Atlantic.

Die weiße Gefahr

Fort Du Conquet Destruction of the Vautier Archives

Resistance fighter under the occupation, committed to the FLN during the Algerian war, member of the Medvedkine group after May 1968 and defender of Breton autonomy, René Vautier was a committed filmmaker, author of an anti-colonialist work in which he denounces the repression, torture and racism. In 1983, René Vautier discovered, by the light of a flashlight, his films cut up and scattered at Fort du Conquet. Police also came to check the damage.