North

A sequence shot by plane from the African coast to the shores of Europe. When you have the privilege of a Western passport, it takes 9min47s. But for the Sudanese writer in exile Youssif Halliem Kiddo, whom we listen to during this flight, the crossing of the Mediterranean was quite different

Xiheng Jie

Short film shot in Guangzhou (China), ShanShan films & Berlin Biennale #12.  Mister Cheng can’t see us so we won’t see him. But we see what he can’t see. An old street of Guangzhou soon to be destroyed, a Man, a Dream.

Abderrahmane Sissako, Beyond Territories

To be somewhere precise yet stand nowhere at all, to embody one’s convictions, yet never  miss the essential, to rise up and be present at the critical moment, to bear witness to a world  waiting to tell itself and be retold, to come and go, both at once, abandoning reckless speed,  but rather gently touching the human soul with images, with whispered words, the cracks in  the wall of life: this is the choreography masterfully created in the film Beyond Territories,  Valerie Osouf’s portrait of the world acclaimed filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako. 

“If you invite someone, you need allow them the space to come in,” confides Abderrahmane  in the film. We are invited in, welcomed and treated with familiarity, permitted into intimate,  physical territory – the poetic and politically engaged terrain of the director of Life On Earth,  Heremakono, Bamako and Timbuktu. 

The spaces the film evokes are countless – real places and cinematic locations: from the  paternal family’s courtyard, to the maternal family’s window, from Mali to China, from Nouakchott to Moscow, these spaces speak of endless displacement, exile, comings and  goings, all these parentheses that delineate the contours of Abderrahmane Sissako’s destiny.  

Geniuses inhabit these places: a film loving police officer, a philosophy professor, Danny  Glover, Martin Scorsese and many others who will, each with his own voice, illuminating the  cinematographic territory of a man for whom, “being loyal to a filmed place” is one of the  fundamental responsibilities of cinema. Alongside them and Abderrahmane Sissako, we will  walk and stumble across the soundstage of the entire world, through the film, Beyond Territories.  

• Image : Rémi Mazet
• Sound : Alioune MBow
• Editing : Valérie Pico
• Visual effects : Stéphane Prince
• Music : Fallou NDiaye et Magic Malik
• Graphic design : Thierry Crombet
• Produced by  Emmanuelle Lepers 

(2017, feature-length documentary) – Petit Dragon / Granit films / ARTE / CANAL HORIZONS / TV5 MONDE / CNC / ELEPHANT

Afterwards

Awarded at Corto di Donne (Naples) and Zagreb (Women film festival).
RCB Bejaïa – AFLAM (Marseille) – Setif – Kaliber35 (Munich) – Ljubljana (Migrant films)

A few days before her death, a very old woman tries to remember her past.

Alzheimer allows her to reinvent swathes of her existence, the most painful – 12 abortions, the coldness of a distant husband – a disease, but a sieve that offers her a possibility to support the weight of existence.

She remembers the Foxtrot and her Jewishness but forgets her own name, or rather her two names: Sylvia Lignon & Messaouada Haki.

Thus, this investigation on identity, articulates intimate memory and collective history,or rather, memory lapses and official historiography.

In the omissions of the character-witness, the truth of emotion beyond the banality of lost anecdotes emerges, the glassy facade of official archives summons up something out of the field of view, something more complex that only time can exhume.

Afterwards, is a film about an ordinary being who traversed the turmoil of the twentieth

century with three wars as milestones of time: the WW1 & 2 and the Algerian war.

This woman, my maternal grandmother, was very talkative before falling ill, I know what she has forgotten, or rather I, sitting and listening out of frame, know what she has told me, that I now retell her.

Afterwards, evokes with simplicity a timeless and universal question: What is a human life?

• Image : Valérie Osouf
• Sound : Emérance Dubas
• Editing : Valérie Pico
• Production : Christine Chansou et Vincent Trintignant-Corneau

National Identity

In development with the support of CNC, Ile de France region, South Region & Pays de Loire Region

A FILM ON INSTITUTIONAL RACISM

If we fail to consider the plight of foreigners, if we fail to perceive what our laws can result in, we begin to lose sight of how low our democracy has fallen.

Ms Simone Gaboriau, Judge.

L’Identite Nationale (National Identity) dramatizes the attempt to resist the discourse on immigration that has gradually corrupted the French body politic over the last 30 years, reaching its zenith under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy (2007 – 2012). In this resistance, L’Identite Nationale proposes to listen to a number of ‘speech acts’ (paroles) by those who have experienced first hand the effects of the governing discourse on immigration. These speech acts extend the time not usually granted them in which to shape themselves, articulate responses to others and perhaps challenge the governing discourse.

L’Identite Nationale thus offers a powerful re-affirmation of the ritual of the filmed interview, in its strongest sense.

The film counters the commonly promoted view that the limited attention span of viewers’ can only be served by a series of short ‘soundbites’.

The structuring of L’Identite Nationale invites the respondent to experience the physical presence of words, the emotional weight of speech. Witnessing, through the medium of film, complex thinking processes unfolding within the temporality authored by the film-maker rather than those notorious ‘soundbites’, is in fact a profoundly cinematographic act.

Affirming the speech act in all its many dimensions: physical, emotional, moral, political is indeed a film-maker’s endeavor and, for some, a film-maker’s responsibility.

The voices attended to in L’Identite Nationale are those of people rarely heard in the cinema: ex-prisoners, who have served double sentences, first for a particular criminal offense and secondly in virtue of their status as foreign nationals, trapped as they are by the interface and significant overlap between criminal law and immigration law. (Contrary to Sarkozy’s announcement in 2003, this unjust penal sanction is still in place.)

The speech acts of those who have suffered the effects of the discourse on immigration are juxtaposed with those of elected politicians, Criminal Justice System professionals and researchers. Taken collectively, these speech acts reciprocally complement and confirm each other, cross over and begin to delineate the contours of what the British have come to call a system of ‘institutional racism’. This could just as readily bear the name State Xenophobia – a sentiment that traverses and negatively informs some of the institutional geographies of our Republic: Police, Courts, Prefectures and Prisons – in its treatment of those defined as ‘other’.

L’Identité Nationale begins with a personal narrative often explored in fiction – that of the break in. Here, the – true – story of a break in, is told by a particular narrator, who arrived in France aged 13 and at [the time he committed the crime] [the age of …] [did] [still does] not hold French nationality. From this starting point the film goes on gradually to unfold the paradoxes of the major principles we have inherited from the Enlightenment.

By reflecting on the contradictory relationship that our Nation-State maintains with the Foreigner – both constitutive and excluded – L’Identite Nationale invites us to redefine our status as citizens and to question the shape as well as the foundations of French identity.

Such questioning is likely to affect spectators well beyond French borders, in all nation- states where identity is constituted through exclusion – an exclusion of unlimited duration….

…..1. See Histoires des Vies Brisées, les ‘double peine’ de Lyon, de Bertrand Tavernier (2001)

• Image : Olivier Dassonville
• Additional shooting : Lucas Leconte
• Sound : Martin Lanot
• Editing : Claude Trinquesse
• Sound editing : Romain Le Bras
• Graphic design and special effects : Corinne BlouetProduction : Audrey Kiefer, Valérie Osouf, Eric Idriss Kanago et Jean-François Fernandez pour Granit films

Cameroon, Autopsy of an Independence

Program33 / France 5 / TSR / RTBF.

Audience Award, Festival International du Film d’Histoire de Pessac.

Right after Germany’s defeat during the first World War, the Society of Nations (SDN) placed Kamerun under the trusteeship of France and Great-Britain. Forced labor and the hardship during the construction of the Douala-Yaounde railroad marks the birth of a structured movement of resistance to the oppressor. In 1948, the French army started a terrible repression against the UPC (a very popular separatist party), which was created the same year. Ten years later, UPC party leader Ruben Um Nyobe is murdered in the bush.

Pierre Messmer, Jacques Foccart, De Gaulle, Gaston Deferre will call upon the 22nd RIC troops – also notoriously called the “Viets breakers”. The colonial commandos will put up an incredibly brutal fight against the guerrilla. Helicopter air strikes and use of napalm gas will spare none. This is Indochina veterans playing a pre-Vietnam war game.
On the day of Independence, January 1st, 1960, France and Cameroon sign a secret pact for military assistance.
While the methods changed, independence never meant the end of the exactions but rather it marked the beginning of massacres in Cameroon. Succeeding the spread of napalm gas, a period of terror began: populations were gathered, torture camps organized, and hundred of Bassa and Bamileke villages were systematically burned down. The French press, rendered silent and blind by the Algerian crisis will not publish a single word on this terrible repression.

In his historical speech during the Conference de la Baule on June 21, 1990, Mitterrand’s conditions for French assistance to Cameroon and other Francophone African countries is the institution of a multiparty system.
This date may be considered the stepping-stone for the end of the bloodshed in Cameroon even though the country’s jails are still packed with political prisoners. Today, corruption and a code of silence rule.

The situation in France vis-a-vis its colonial past is peculiar. France has so far only paid lip service to efforts at dealing with this part of its history. Little effort has been made to research and teaching programs, memorial sites etc, all means to go beyond the simplistic cleavage of guilt and pride it usually implies. With this film, we will travel to the heart of a taboo of French colonial history, we will reflect on an unfamiliar focal point of our contemporary History. Our goal is to better define what constitutes the backbone of the “colonial fracture.”

• Image : Gaëlle Le Roy
• Sound : Valérie Osouf
• Editing : Ruben Korenfeld
• Production : Christine Doublet et Fanny Glissant pour Program33 

No comment: the land where one never arrives

Three years after the passing of the so-called Pasqua laws and less than ten years after the introduction of compulsory visas for nationals of former French colonies, what about the repression of immigration? Since 1993, 80,000 people have been expelled from French territory, including more than a thousand to Senegal. Eight of them bear witness to their history…

• Image : Rémi Mazet & Lucas Leconte
• Sound : Badara Sissoko
• Editing : Cécile Dubois