This split-screen video essay deconstructs the depiction of a seemingly innocent object—the handbag—in order to propose a textual and political analysis of censorship and intimacy in post-revolution Iran. ‘Irani Bag’ invites the spectator to reconsider the relationship between sight and touch.

‘Nazarbazi’ [the play of glances] is a film about love and desire in Iranian cinema where depictions of intimacy and touch between women and men are prohibited.

Two women lie together in bed. As the wind bashes against the window, one recalls a past date to the cinema. The narrated scene cannot be conveyed through images. Layers of found and original footage are superimposed to fill in some of the cracks, the deletions, the limits of representation. A love song that would never pass through the censors, ‘Mast-del’ is about forbidden bodies and desires inside and outside post-revolution Iranian cinema.

After living in France for over a decade, filmmaker Aïcha Chloé Borro returns to her native Burkina Faso on the death of her uncle – father to 22 children and patriarch of the family she left behind. The viewer may anticipate an incoming cultural clash between the Westernised director and her relatives deeply rooted in local customs and mentalities, yet the film strives for a much more complex discourse. Borro’s camera is not aimed at the friction between a Western and an African world, but at the growing and deepening fissures within a so-called traditional society, fissures brought to light by the dispute over what will happen to the patriarch’s house. One side of the family wants to sell it; for the other, it is an inalienable space that has seen the birth and death of generations of ancestors. Owing to Borro’s empathy and subtlety, combined with her power of expression and talent for making the particular resonate with the universal, what seems like a trivial drama, common to most families, becomes an exposé on the civilisational consequences of accelerated modernisation, post-colonialism, and globalisation. All with a hint of magic – the spirits of the ancestors are always keeping close. (Liri Alienor Chapelan)

With his old fashioned camera, the videographer Mr. Zagor (75 years) is documenting the last four years of his life, filming his loneliness and sickness. He shares the fears of his neighbors of being evicted from three different locations where he lived in precarious conditions. A poetic statement and an empowering cinematic document, ‘Zagor’s Death’ gives voice to the disenfranchised people that do not fit with the new dynamic image of big and expensive cities, such as Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

The workers’ struggles of the past and those of today do not form a line of perfect continuity: perhaps the harsh working conditions, stripping the individual of their dignity and turning them into a tool, as much as the emergence, in this vitriolic context, of a branch solidarity are indeed recurrent ingredients that lead up to these movements; yet the global political and economic situation has evolved so much, particularly over the past two centuries, that drawing a perfect parallel would be an act of simplifying history. Agnès Perrais starts from the more evident similarities, and then turns to the nuances of the two workers' struggles that make up the subject of her film, adopting a distinct perspective for each. On the one hand, we see a historian's thoroughness in recounting the uprising of wool workers in 14th-century Florence, an uprising among the first of its kind. On the other, we’re witnesses to an energetic commitment to the cause of the foreign workers working today behind the scenes of the Italian luxury fashion industry, and who are suffering from both the historical injustices typically borne by the proletariat and the abuses committed by a Europe that, on the official front, rejects immigrants, and, on the unofficial one, exploits them. The two strands are brought together by the charismatic figure of Alessandro Stella, a former radical-method militant who, for the second part of his life, has taken refuge in the objectivity of his occupation as a historian. (Liri Alienor Chapelan)

Yousef Srouji's film is short, personal, and powerful, using materials that make up the very fabric of his childhood to probe the seemingly eternal conflict between Israel and Palestine. During the second Intifada in the early 2000s, the home-movies shot by Yousef's parents suddenly become politically charged, turning into unsettling documents of a family's efforts to protect their domestic universe from the ever-tightening noose of outside dangers. Yousef's mother becomes a symbol of the individual torn between, on the one hand, her family obligations and her own physical integrity and, on the other, her desire to document, and, possibly, to participate in the uprising of her people. Despite the pleas of the whole family to remain under shelter, the young woman seems unable to let go of her camera and is drawn irrevocably to the windows of the house, which show signs of bombing. Her relationship with her children, where the role of the documentarist sometimes precedes that of her figure as a mother, is a most provocative aspect of a film that is sadly more topical than ever. (Liri Alienor Chapelan)

Boubacar Sangaré's film deftly manages to sit at the intersection of the universal and the particular, following the ordinary yet exceptional daily life of Rasmané, a 16-year-old boy making a living in a mining town in Southern Burkina Faso. While his work and that of his companions, many only slightly older than him, is exhausting and risky, performed with rudimentary tools and without any protective equipment, when Rasmané returns from the mine, he turns out to be a teenager like any other, afflicted by contradictory impulses, oscillating between childish naivety and a burning need to put on and flaunt the adult identity he is in the process of creating. All around him, the entire collective seems torn by similar contradictions, between preserving tradition and the lure of modernity, between wounded dignity and the absurd hope of enrichment, between fatalism and the promise of a future that is gold-plated, both literally and figuratively. Despite the rich imagery that surrounds the act and business of mining - first a symbol of industrialization, then of de-industrialization - and a certain crystalized idea of adolescence that Rasmané incarnates, Sangaré's protagonist remains opaque throughout the film, constantly reminding us that we cannot share his fate through a mere empathic transposition. (Liri Alienor Chapelan)

Trying to escape the war, a number of Ukrainian refugees end up being transported by the same car. This van becomes a transitory refuge, an intimate, fragile space of confessions and secrets. The candid conversations between the passengers and the driver on the topics of life, anxieties, dreams, and expectation assemble into a collective portrait, while the blend of closeness and distance creates emotion. Maciek Hamela’s film is also a testimony to the immense mobilization among Ukraine’s neighbouring countries, Poland, in this case, where everyone is trying to be as helpful as they can to those in need. The vehicle becomes a small utopia of solidarity that transcends borders, where the governing principle is "Together for something better". All you have to do is look into the rearview mirror. (Carmen Lascoiu)