Franssou Prenant

In this intimate portrait addressed directly to Hélène Hazera, filmmaker Judith Abitbol revisits a key figure of France’s countercultures from the late 1960s to the 1990s. A member of the Gazolines and the FHAR (Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action), Hazera was a tireless LGBTQ activist who founded Act Up’s Trans and AIDS commissions—one of her proudest achievements. Her true victory, however, was becoming the first transgender journalist at a major national newspaper (Libération), and later a producer at Radio France and France TV. Through her story, Abitbol reconnects with the insurrectionary spirit and creative chaos of those decades—an era when French culture was shaken by radical imagination, humor, and defiance. The film celebrates these modern Antigones who dared to live their desires beyond the reach of any law.

Young trans women turn the streets of Paris into their cabaret. Their dreams are quickly caught up by reality.

Lunettes and Myope: two ways of resisting the world. Identical and opposites, face to face or, more often, back to back, in a small room in a timeless space. Twins and adversaries, these two girls make one: Lunettes uses her glasses to help her understand the world, or at least accept it; Myope can't see, except within herself, and lost in her blurred, but sharp, experience of the world, rebels continuously. Incited by Lunettes, Myope creates (in the same city and climate, but in another dimension) two characters: Pierrot and Agathe. To a certain degree, these two are a disjointed response to Myope, Lunettes, neighbors, and distant representatives. It's very hot. The inhabitants are interested in fountains and shadows. They build cool cabins, hanging curtains over the balcony balustrades. Asphalt sticks to the soles of sandals and when the wind blows, the canopies flap above the café terraces.

Michel Recanati was a militant leader in the May, 1968 riots in Paris, organizing many groups to meet, discuss, and act on leftist principles both before and after the disturbances. He was imprisoned for a short while in 1973. Disillusioned after the failure of the demonstrations and the death of the only woman he had loved, his life seems to have changed from a period of hope and activism to one of bottomless despair. His friend, Romain Goupil wrote and directed this biographical documentary. Death at 30 received the 1982 Cannes Film Festival's Golden Camera Award for "Best First Feature-Length Film."

A man invites a woman to share his room in a hostel and gradually falls in love with her.

She was 18. They were in love and lived together for ten years. 20 years later, he receives a letter from her. L is very ill. He grabs hold of his camera and films while trying to make her talk about other things, about cinema and what’s become of those political struggles…

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Through my window-camera, during urban adventures, views of Algiers, where, as a child, after Algerian Independence, I learned about liberty, and which some decades later after immigrating against my will and deliberately becoming an exile, I chose as my city. I was then a "wife of the Republic of Madagascar," as the left-hand side page of my passport noted, while the right-hand side declared "of the ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary." Disembodied, words off-screen, intervening one over the other, simultaneous encounters of polyphonic voices glide.

Between Paris and Syria, the Orient remains an ordinary place filled with literature, myth, and the pulse of love. A love film without lovers, based on a poem by Constantin Cavafy.

A young gay man falls head over heels in love with an Algerian labourer he meets in transvestite bar where he is a regular.

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A famous docking : Algiers, the White City, in a radiant light. The picture darkens with a voice-over reading of the text of the surrender of the Dey of Algiers in 1830. "About the Conquest" confronts us with a page of the French national novel that was too hastily turned.

"In the summer of 1969, the first and memorable Panafrican Festival of Algiers (Panaf of its small name) had brought together, assembled from all over Africa, musicians, dancers and theater groups, messenger artists from "brother countries", movements from liberation and the diaspora of the Americas. Forty years later, in July 2009, the second edition of this festival took place. During this one, I filmed several dance troupes in rehearsals or performances; the levitated bodies of the dancers, the energy, the grace and the life they give off." (Franssou Prenant)

René Schérer, who calls himself Professor Hairibus, is a philosopher, professor emeritus at the University of Paris 8, and author of many works. His philosophy is not couched in an esoteric language, it can be practised by children, women, blacks, farmers, the elderly, geese, and even adults.

Storm in Brittany. Destruction of a pheasant farm. Reflections between father and son on the future.

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I spent six months in Guinea - Conakry - between February and July 1986; shooting alone in Super8, I filmed elements of people’s lives and fragments of my own. (Françoise Prenant)

It happens in, under, through the holes of Beirut, its floating gaps, along gullies from drilled pipes, in the dust of what is left of it, remained, because it is of the past this Beirut we see, of the recent past, filmed in 1995, before the city center collapsed by the war was razed and rebuilt.

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France, 1972. Albertine, a teenager in rebellion against school, the rancid family and religion, asserts her rights to a sexuality without obstacles. Wiith her friends, and the right to the abortion for the minor ones. With her friends, she campaigns for the rights to sexual pleasure and abortion for minor girls.