Koropa

Laura Henno
,
FR
,
2016
,
DCP
,
colour
,
20'

Ben is a pilot and repairman of kwassa-kwassa, traditional fishing boats of the Comoros, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean divided by a violent border inherited from colonisation. Like in the Mediterranean, many risk their lives in the attempted crossing from Anjouan to Mayotte, the archipelago’s only island that remains French today. To escape misery, Ben abandoned fishing to become a people smuggler. In this shadowy enterprise, he does his best to stick to his ethics and ensure his passengers’ safety. This is the trade he is passing on, in the dead of night, to Patron. To escape a conviction, Ben has no other choice than to make of this child a “commander”, as he is too young to be put in prison. Koropa plays out this silent rite of passage, this solemn apprenticeship, the transmission of a know-how that owes as much to deceit as to the art of piloting a hostile ocean. With its short and radical form, its abstract space, Koropa escapes the documentary form to produce a classical drama in which two silent figures, those of father and son, two bodies share a perilous journey on the brink of the land of the dead, navigating a ghost-haunted ocean. A crossing that awakens memories of many others, in a world where seas arise as borders and tombs. (Olivier Marboeuf)

 

Shindzuani with English subtitles

Amérika: Bahía de las Flechas

Ana Vaz
,
BR
,
2016
,
DCP
,
colour
,
9'

It is said that in the year of 1492, the first European ship led by Christopher Columbus, disembarked on the coast of Samaná, present-day Dominican Republic, and was received by a rain of arrows carefully plotted by the Caribbean Taíno. Presently, a saline lake named after the Taíno chief Enriquillo witnesses profound eco-systemic changes leading to species migration, forced evacuation and an expanding coral desert revealing the lake’s geologic past. Taking the camera itself as an arrow, a foreign body, Amérika: Bay of Arrows looks for ways in which to animate, to awaken, to make vibrate again this gesture in the present – arrows against a perpetual “falling sky”.

 

Spanish with English subtitles

Ouroboros

Basma Alsharif
,
BE, FR, PS
,
2017
,
DCP
,
colour
,
77'

“An homage to the Gaza Strip and to the possibility of hope beyond hopelessness. Ouroboros, the symbol of the snake eating its tail, is both end and beginning: death as regeneration. An experimental narrative film that turns the destruction of Gaza into a story of heartbreak, Ouroboros asks what it means to be human when humanity has failed. Taking the form of a love story, the film’s central character is Diego Marcon, a man who embarks on a circular journey to shed his pain only to experience it, again and again. In the course of a single day, his travel fuses together Native American territories, the ancient Italian city of Matera, a castle in Brittany, and the ruins of the Gaza Strip into one single landscape.” (BA)

 

Italian, English and Chinook with English subtitles