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The meat industry is booming in Quebec, Canada, where huge factories use standardized production methods to convert vast herds of livestock into meat. They hire asylum seekers, mainly from Latin America, so they can continue to produce at competitive rates. This observational film splits its focus between the workers and the animals; between the parallel...
Miguel’s War
Teddy Award for Best Feature Film – Berlinale Panorama – 2021Sélection officielle – Festival du nouveau cinéma – 2021Sélection officielle – NewFest NY – 2021Sélection officielle – Raindance Film Festival – 2021 MIGUEL’S WAR is the story of a gay man who grew up oppressed and shamed during the Lebanese civil war. Raised by a conservative Catholic father and an authoritarian Syrian mother, teenage Miguel was inhibited by a deep inferiority complex and was incapable of asserting himself. In 1983 the deeply sensitive boy, desperate to prove he “exists” and can act like “a real man” joined the fighting as part of an armed faction. But his experience was a failure. Traumatized he immigrates to Madrid, Spain. In post-Franco Madrid, Miguel seeks to liberate himself through debauchery. A string of destructive relationships lead him to a failed suicide. Trying to pull himself together, Miguel becomes a conference interpreter in Barcelona. Only then, thirty-seven years after leaving Lebanon, Miguel feels ready to face his trauma and the ghosts of his past, and hopes to regain his emotional balance and maybe even find love. Using intertwining cinematic forms, melding documentary, animation, theater and archive and filmed on location in Lebanon and Spain, this feature film hopes to offer an experience of self-confrontation, awareness and catharsis.
The New Bauhaus
Official Selection – FIFA – 2020Official Selection – Chicago International Film Festival – 2019Official Selection – Palm Springs International Film Festival – 2020 An odyssey through the life and legacy of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the innovative artist and educator whose pioneering approach to integrating technology into design continues to influence and inspire. *** In the 1920s, rising artist László Moholy-Nagy taught at the revolutionary Bauhaus school in Weimar, Germany, alongside luminaries like Paul Klee, Josef Albers, Anni Albers, Gunta Stolzl, Wassily Kandinsky, and Marcel Breuer. An upstart within this esteemed group, Moholy established himself as a visionary, and the approach he developed while teaching became the ethos of his work: training artists to live “happier lives in modernity.” Forced into exile by the Nazis, Moholy moved to Chicago with his two daughters and his second wife, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, where he found himself inspired by the sense of re-invention in the city. Initially at the New Bauhaus and ultimately through the Institute of Design, Moholy challenged students to create systemic, human-centered design. Motivated by the challenge of creating within the limitations of the Great Depression and then World War II, Moholy’s embrace of artistic versatility and technological possibility continues to reverberate in the artworld today.Objects that are now ubiquitous in our culture, such as the Dove soap bar, the Honey Bear, and the cover of the first issue of Playboy magazine were designed by students and alumni of The New Bauhaus. Graduates of the Institute of Design became renowned fine art photographers and pioneers of digital design […]
Ascension
Best Documentary Feature – Tribeca Film Festival – 2021Albert Maysles Award for Best New Documentary Director – Tribeca Film Festival – 2021Grand Jury Prize – International Documentary Feature – Calgary International Film Festival – 2021Best Documentary Feature – Hamptons International Film Festival – 2021 ASCENSION is an impressionistic portrait of China’s industrial supply chain that reveals the country’s growing class divide through staggering observations of labor, consumerism and wealth. The documentary portrays capitalism in China across the levels of its operation, from the crudest mine to the most rarefied forms of leisure. Accordingly, the film is structured in three parts, ascending through the levels of the capitalist structure: workers running factory production, the middle class training for and selling to aspirational consumers, and the elites reveling in a new level of hedonistic enjoyment. In traveling up the rungs of China’s social ladder, we see how each level supports and makes possible the next while recognizing the contemporary “Chinese Dream” remains an elusive fantasy for most.
Instructions for Survival
Teddy Award – BerlinaleCompass Award – BerlinaleBest Documentary Film – Ann Arbor Film FestivalBest Director – Seoul IWFF The flm is about love story of one couple Alexandre and Marie. Alexandre is a transgender and lives with his girlfriend Marie. Because of his trans identity and mark “female” in passport, Alexandre has to lead a secret life. Such people like him are threatened with persecution and death in his homeland. In order to escape this hopeless situation, Marie decides to make a surrogacy. With this money, the couple wants to flee to Europe and finally live in freedom. But with the time their pragmatical plan wrecks, because Alexandre and Marie fell in love with the child in Mari’s belly.
Les harmonies invisibles
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE Prix Ushuaïa TV / Écrans de l’aventure – Festival Les Écrans de l’Aventure – France – 2021 The Arctic tales of our childhood have fixed in our visual memory the image of the narwhal, that unicorn of the seas, with its long-twisted tooth, emerging on the surface of the water. Going to the Arctic in search of this image is an opportunity for Laurent and Vincent to confront their childhood dreams with the reality of a rapidly changing world. « At the heart of Inuit mythology, the narwhal embodies the hyper-boreal universe », says the Inuit artist Andrew Qappik. But we must not lose sight of the fact that this animal, hunted for its meat, its teeth and its skin, has become rare. It embodies the fragility of the Inuit world. Indeed, if we are not careful, the cultural heritage of these men of the Great North is doomed to disappear. Their world is disappearing as the ice pack melts. For the Marie brothers, the loss of the Inuit’s ancestral landmarks would also lead to the disappearance of the vital power of the tales that nourished their childhood. The Invisible Harmonies look for an open window on the world animated by the magic of cinema. The film thus offers an account of the invisible links between man and animal, the imagination and the real, but also the link between two brothers in their understanding of the world. Discover also our special program gathering the works of Vincent Marie: Bartolí, le dessin pour […]
In Balanchine’s Classroom
IN BALANCHINE’S CLASSROOM takes us back to the glory years of Balanchine’s New York City Ballet through the remembrances of his former dancers and their quest to fulfill the vision of a genius. Opening the door to his studio, Balanchine’s private laboratory, they reveal new facets of the groundbreaking choreographer: taskmaster, mad scientist, and spiritual teacher. Today, as his former dancers teach a new generation, questions arise: what was the secret of his teaching? Can it be replicated? Filled with never before seen archival footage of Balanchine at work, along with interviews with many of his adored and adoring dancers and those carrying on his legacy today, this is Balanchine as you have never seen him. This film will thrill anyone interested in the intensity of the master-disciple relationship and all who love dance, music, and the creative process.
Writing with Fire
QUEBEC PREMIERE Audience Award – World Cinema Documentary – Sundance Film Festival – 2021World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award – Impact and Change – Sundance Film Festival – 2021Special Jury Prize – Documentary Competition – Seattle International Film Festival – 2021 In a cluttered news landscape dominated by men, emerges India’s only newspaper run by Dalit (‘low caste’) women. Armed with smartphones, Chief Reporter Meera and her journalists break traditions, be it on the frontlines of India’s biggest issues or within the confines of their homes, redefining what it means to be powerful.
Les Sorcières de l’Orient
Journey to meet the former players of the Japanese women’s volleyball team. Now in their 70s, they used to be known as the « Witches of the Orient » because of their seemingly supernatural powers on the courts. From the formation of the squad in the late 1950s as a worker’s team at a textile factory, right up until their triumph at the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo, their memories and true magic from long ago bubble up into a heady brew where fact and fable fly hand in hand.
Debout les femmes!
Nominee – Best Documentary Film – César – 2022 In this new journey, Ruffin & Perret embarks us across France to meet caretakers at the front lines during the current Covid-19 crises. Those people, mostly women, who give their lives, their time and often their health to help and care for elders, disabled and left out are in fact left aside by the French social regulations. No minimum wage, no work-time limitation, no social recognition force them to stand up for their basic rights!