“La rage au coeur. De plein fouet. Gueules ouvertes. Rafles. Octobre 2005. Un quartier de Paris se révolte, spontanément. Et l’écho du désespoir et de la colère n’a d’égal que l’injustice qui frappe les habitants jours après jours. Gestus historique qui renvoie aux luttes populaires les plus belles, les plus ténues, les plus fragiles: esclaves de Spartacus, insurgés de la Commune, noirs et latinos américains... Des mondes comme des poings qui se serrent, des coeurs qui se battent, tandis que les poitrines se soulèvent”. (SG)

“Rage in the heart. Head-on. The mouth agape. Raids. October 2005. A neighbourhood in Paris revolts, spontaneously. Only the injustice which befalls its inhabitants day after day is equal to the echo of their despair and anger. Historical gestus which recalls the most beautiful, fragile and resistant popular fights: Spartacus’s slaves, the insurgents of the Paris commune, blacks, Latinos... Worlds that are like tighten fists, beating hearts, just as the chests rise up.” (SG)

“Paris, ville ouverte. Vertiges des commémorations. Ruines. Vents. Marées. Naked eyes. De jeunes migrants irakiens, afghans, iraniens errent dans les rues, entre soupes populaires et camps de fortune. Partant, ils mettent en crise l’ordre des choses et la société bourgeoise. Un mouvement d’émancipation advient, profondément mélancolique, élégiaque: redéfinir le concept de révolution par un nouveau concept d’Histoire.” (SG)

“Paris, open city. Dizziness of commemorations. Ruins. Winds. Tides. Naked eyes. The young migrants – Iraqis, Afghans, Iranians – wander in the streets, between soup kitchens and fortune camps. As they leave, they provoke a crisis of the order of things and bourgeois society. A movement of emancipation arises, profoundly melancholic, elegiac: to redefine the concept of revolution through a new concept of History”. (SG) 

“Description dans la nuit noire, près du port de Calais, d’une rafle de migrants. Description, dans le noir, d’une nuit politique. Choisir son camp.” (SG)

Part of Outrage & Rébellion, a collective film made for Joachim Gatti, a filmmaker who was badly hurt by the police during a peaceful demonstration in Montreuil in July 2009. “Description in the dark of the night of a raid against migrants near the Calais harbour. Description, in the dark, of a political night. To choose one’s side.” (SG)

“L’Empire t’attend. Engage-toi dans la coloniale. Mali, Haute Volta, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Burkina Faso… terrains de chasse de l’Occident, champs expérimentaux des guerres coloniales, raciales et économiques. D’hier et d’aujourd’hui. Jusqu’à ce que les révoltes – voix isolées, pellicules volées, ou choeurs collectifs – brûlent l’arrogance des puissants, grondent et résonnent dans l’Histoire. D’hier. Et d’aujourd’hui.“ (SG)

“The Empire is waiting. Get involved in the colony. Mali, the High Volta, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Burkina Faso... hunting playgrounds for the West, experimental fields for colonial, racial and economical wars. From yesterday to today, and until the revolts – isolated voices, stolen films, collective choirs – burn the arrogance of the powerful, with a roar resonating in History.” (SG)

“Have the wolves ever howled ? 

On hunting, without fire weapons nor victims, and quicksand as conditions of common living.

Fear, destruction, the “everyone against everyone war”, mythical and dreadful nature, act here as conceptual lures, presenting the world as it doesn’t work: it’s always constructed. Men have to face themselves. 

Of a film facing dictatorship.

Of revolution as gesture.” (SG)

“To resist. On the frontlines.

Soldier-men tracked down, hunted, prisoners, exhibited as trophy, deportations and working camps in Siberia and Austria, cities in ruins, scars, mass graves... Prigionieri della guerra is the first chapter of the “trilogy of war” devoted to the first world war as a “forgotten war”. Or how to wake up from the dream of an “European era”: industralised mass massacres, fascism, control societies, violence inflicted to nature, failure of classical humanism. 

On the burning becoming of memory.” (SG)

A film in five chapters, with titles inspired by figures such as Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Dostoïevski and Benjamin, that oscillates between Calais and Paris, black&white and colour, sound and silence. “To pan wide, to gather food for eye and mind, such is the project. Because Sylvain George, as we have come to understand, perceives his film-making activity as a mission with at least a dual purpose. To claim, on the one hand the avant-gardes’ formal inheritance, drawing on the unbridled vigour of their “logical revolts”. On the other hand, get these manifestations to testify for those who cry out for justice and justly call for shots other than those laid down by prevailing standards. Evocative, though with precise dates and references, silent while at the same time in quest of the most just eloquence, this cinema seeks to bring together both the past and what is as yet unnamed.” (Jean-Pierre Rehm)