Le Fresnoy

In the summer of 1979, gay porn producer Anne sets out to film her most ambitious film yet, but her actors are picked off, one by one, by a mysterious killer.

This film was shot between 2014 and 2019 in the town of Zhili, a district of Huzhou City in Zhejiang province, China. Zhili is home to over 18,000 privately-run workshops producing children's clothes, mostly for the domestic market, but some also for export. The workshops employ around 300,000 migrant workers, chiefly from the rural provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Anhui, Jiangxi, Henan and Jiangsu.

Island of La Réunion, in the beginning of the 20th century. Five teenagers commit a savage crime. As punishment, a Dutch captain takes them to a supernatural island with luxuriant vegetation and bewitching powers.

Stranded along a sublime river fjord in northern Portugal, an ornithologist is subjected to a series of brutal and erotic Stations-of-the-Cross-style tests.

Short lo-fi film set in Senegal. Mostly focussing on a group of Senegalese youths, discussing their hopes and fears concerning the crossing of the atlantic to get to Europe. Will life be easier there or not?

André Demester secretly and painfully loves Barbe, his childhood friend, accepting from her the little that she gives him. He leaves home to be a soldier in a war in a far off land. Barbarity, camaraderie and fear turn him into a warrior. As the seasons go by, Barbe, alone and wasting away, waits for the soldiers to return. Will Demester’s boundless love for Barbe save him?

IVUL is the extraordinary story of Alex (Jacob Auzanneau), a young man who climbs on to the roof of his house and refuses to ever come back down to earth. His actions devastate his beloved family and we watch as their world falls apart. A dark and mysterious gardener (Tchili from This Filthy Earth) keeps watch over the family but is powerless to exorcise the curse that he feels has befallen them. Meanwhile the twin sisters (Manon and Capucine) provide light but sometimes macabre relief. The world of IVUL is a world of both fairytale and nightmare with the family manor house and forest landscape providing a compelling backdrop to the story.

""I collect. I document. I write down my memories. I’m afraid they’ll disappear." This is how Victoria Verseau introduces her intimate documentary diary, in which she returns to Thailand and to the year 2012, when she underwent her transition. She had long awaited this moment, but then came feelings of uncertainty, amplified by the death of a close friend. The conceptual artist adopts an almost archaeological approach to the past and lays bare the process of writing a personal story that is intrinsically linked to the creation of her own identity. In this deeply felt debut she reveals the joyful aspects and also the dark recesses of transition and, bringing other testimonies into play as well, she critically examines what defines women as women."

A young woman wandering around meets a young man going to a casting call for a pornographic film.

Wang Xilin, 86, is one of China's most important modern classical composers. During the Cultural Revolution he was the target of severe persecution, enduring beatings, imprisonment and torture. With excerpts from his Symphonies, he revisits for this film some of the horrifying events that still live on in his memory as testimony to an era that saw the dehumanization of the entire Chinese nation.

Carrying on Luc Moullets unfinished screenplay about the theft of la pénélope, a camera created by Aaton and capable of recording equally well in 35 mm and digitally, LA ROUGE ET LA NOIRE is a film in kaleidoscope form. The portrait of Aatons founder, Jean-Pierre Beauviala creator, inter alia, of the time-code and the light cameras used by the New Wave (in particular the bush camera specially designed for Jean Rouch) is centered around the basic plot introduced by two women thieves who talk as voice-overs, and whose identities will only be revealed at the end.

The mood is heated. Demonstrations are taking place across France, also in front of the Paris hotel where an Italian named Giorgio is booking the bridal suite for him and his boyfriend Antonio. Hotel manager Diana doesn’t trust them and calls the police to get rid of the odd couple. Italians? Homosexuals? Criminals? In the charged atmosphere of the Hotel Occidental, little is needed for initial suspicions to be aroused.

The world is alive, but maybe without mirrors and images, none of it would exist. The blind create images in a different way – with sounds, textures and experiences. When you enter the rabbit hole, imagination plays the main part.

An actress rehearses behind closed doors scenes from the trial of Joan of Arc, confronted with the view that spectators have character.

A visit to the Louvre in Paris commentated by an actor reading Cézanne.

In a film, meeting a strange tribe often starts with the plunging view from a building necessary to the journey. The architecture of Jean-Pierre Secq dubbed the noise of the waves washes over us in this way. However, to open it, the construction was massive and still, unfolding the three concrete wings of this equatorial greenhouse in Lille. This essay on the conquest of America assumes its own contradiction, underlined by a montage of texts by colonisers: Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Hans Staden, Jean de Léry, Charles de la Condamine and the use of costumes and masks inspired by Brazilian modernism. The discovery of a new world conducted in slow motion listening to the minutes of an unlikely trial of the invaders. The most restrained of movements, surplus, to make the most of rediscovering the New World. Gilles Grand, FID Marseille catalogue, 2012.

João Pedro Rodrigues answers the question from the title with an autobiographical short-film.

A home-guard serviceman assigned the task of standing watch over a barren no-man's-land begins to experience an existential crisis after years of lonely service.

300 million years ago, the north of France was a wetland. 140 years ago, a canal is dug and never filled with water. One day, vagabonds decide to go down an invisible river and pick on the way débris of a world to start a new one. The film finds its starting point in the 1970s environmental scandal of Love Canal (NY, USA) who led to the Superfund act (1986), the first federal program on damages caused to natural ressources by industrial sites. From there, the film traces a path through the post-industrial landscapes of north of France and questions, through fiction, the taking in hand (metaphorically and litterally) of those great landscapes.

In an Argentina divided between a deep conservatism and an unprecedented momentum in feminism, the film delves into the political journey and intimate lives of Claudia and Violeta. Trans women who identify as transvestites, the fight they lead with their comrades against the patriarchal violence is visceral and embodied. Convinced of their roles at the center of an ongoing revolution that intersects with so many struggles, in defiance of the old world they redouble their energy to invent a new present, to love and stay alive.