Quilombo Films

If there is one person Matthew Lancit can’t get out of his mind, it is his uncle Harvey. Dark rings around his eyes, pale, blind, his legs amputated. Like Harvey, the filmmaker also suffers from diabetes. He has the disease under control, but one question is always nagging at him: How much longer? His long-term (self-)observation reliably revolves around fears of infirmity and mutilation. He translates the feared body horror into film, stages himself as a zombie, vampire, a desolate figure. Lancit playfully anticipates his potential decline, serving up a whole arsenal of effects which – as video recordings prove – go back to his youth. It is not for nothing that the “dead” in the title is also reminiscent of “dad.” Because “Play Dead!” also negotiates his own role as a father.

Patrona, Mexico. A railroad runs through the village. Every day, migrants try to cross the American border, crammed onto the roofs of the freight trains. As soon as they hear the train whistle blow, Norma, Bernarda and a dozen of other women from Patrona stand along the tracks to help the men who dream of a better life.

Forty years after the fall of Phnom Penh, Cambodian artists inherit a pluralistic history whose groping threads they unravel. Sera Ing works on the sculpture which will become the first memorial of the genocide but the project encounters difficulties to exist. How do artists reappropriate history and culture from which they have been dispossessed?

Mozambique 1974 - the European name of the capital Lourenço Marques was deleted and replaced by Maputo. Between the delicacy and the apocalyptic, Brisa Solar reveals the little secrets of an African city that was born from a modernist dream, which led a revolution and which today sees its cultural heritage and threatened by Chinese capitalism.

Out in the suburbs around Paris, a specialized teacher, Josiane, is taking care of five children failing at school. There, they share their fears, joys and sufferings at school. 'In session do not disturb' introduces us to their world while they will learn to learn.

Summer in the suburbs. Between two massive towers, aeroplanes trace thin threads of cotton. Two young sisters run away. Dream? Reality? The film unfolds like a philosophical tale, in which off camera voices punctuate the thoughts of children on the verge of growing up. Somewhere between a Western and a fantasy film, this waking dream marks the passage from childhood to adolescence.

In 1917, during the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, hundreds of families, supporters of the fallen tsar and imperial Russia, fled the country and took refuge all over Europe. A hundred years later, nostalgia for the Motherland is still alive…