Directing
Aïssa is a Congolese immigrant in France. She says that she is under eighteen but the authorities consider her an adult. To determine if she can be deported, a doctor must give her a physical examination.
This is the travel of Karim who was not gone back home for 10 years. A come-back that looks like a one-way ticket. Algeria. Before he forgets, find again the reasons why he left one day, the big exodus, the burning home. But the words have been sucked up in an uncertain time, in a movement that allows to be anchored. Some where.
Bakary, a young man from Mali, sits on a rock in a lake and pours a small packet of milk over his head and body. He then takes an egg, looks at it carefully and says “Monday”, after which he breaks it and drops the yolk into the water. He repeats this several times. Having followed all his marabout’s instructions to the letter, his next crossing should now be successful.
Between the Calais Jungle, where Tarek Sami spent many months filming; Algeria, which he left at the age of 20; and South Africa, where his brother has now settled, the filmmaker captures faces and stories by the fireside, staving off the fatality of the world’s polarity and reclaiming history. With this graceful film, he delivers a poetic ode to the damned of the earth striving to live their lives.
Down on the banks of the Maroni River, little Derreck dreams of heroic warriors. He’s a member of the Wayana tribe in French Guyana. In this film, Derreck is not our only portal into another world. His sister Sylvana also dreams – of an impossible love, who belongs to a different tribe. Their grandmother Malilou takes us back to her youth in the 1950s. It seems that everyone wanders off now and again into a parallel, at times almost ghostly world. Whereas the youngest members of the tribe can still lose themselves in boundless flights of fantasy, the older generation contemplates more existential questions. How do dreams of the future relate to identity? What makes you a real Wayana?
In the heart of a Corsican forest at night, a woman dreams of hunting. After killing, as she looks into the eyes of dead wild animals, she can see faces. Those of people who in real life are about to die. This is an ancestral gift that was passed on to her, and comes from the depth of the island. Even though today, no one seems to care about her visions anymore. Because she is a wild woman. A Mazzera... There is only this one shepherd who is still paying attention.
