Mohammed Soudani
Directing
Biography
Mohammed Soudani (محمد سوداني), born in 1949 in Chlef, Algeria, is a cinematographer and director of Algerian and Swiss nationalities. After his schooling in Algeria, he studied at the Institute of Advanced Cinematographic Studies (IDHEC) in Paris. In 1980, Mohammed Soudani completed his training as a director of photography in the United States. He is a cinematographer on the feature films of Sidiki Bakaba and Roger Gnoan M'Bala in Ivory Coast. Mohammed Soudani has lived in the canton of Ticino in Switzerland since 1972, he is of Algerian and Swiss nationality. The specificity of Mohammed Soudani's cinematography is these different cultures, Algerian, sub-Saharan and Swiss. The first two films he made were documentaries: Nawa, Man and Water and Yiribakro, Sacred Wood. These films are the start of an initiatory journey for the filmmaker into the world of the sacred where ancestral animist practices mingle with other religious rituals. In 1998, Mohammed Soudani made his first feature film, Waalo Fendo - The Day the Earth Freezes, the story of a young Senegalese immigrant in Milan who brings his brother to Europe. A perfect example of integration, Mohammed Soudani won the Swiss Film Award for best fiction film with this feature film. In parallel with this work as a director, Mohammed Soudani works as a director of photography for RTS (Swiss Radio and Television). He teaches audiovisual at SUPSI, the Higher University School of Italian-speaking Switzerland, and is also a producer at Amka films. In 2002, Mohammed Soudani conceived the documentary, War without images - Algeria, I know that you know, with Michael von Graffenried, the only Western photographer who continued to work in Algeria during the 10 years of civil war. The filmmaker returns to his homeland after thirty years of absence. He searches for people that Michael von Graffenried photographed a few years earlier to find out what happened to them. The film addresses both the fate of the human being behind the photograph, but also the requirements and limits of taking pictures, of the use and abuse of images.
Known For
Zanzibar is an Italian television series.
Zanzibar
This is not how the young Swiss couple imagined their desert trip: on their way to Timbuktu, they break down and are stranded in the Algerian desert of Tar. Oliver is more concerned with the broken truck than with Elena, so she explores the oasis alone. There she meets two women: a mysterious fortune teller and the young Aya. And then there is Saïd's small public telephone exchange, which connects Tar with the outside world. While Elena discovers a new world, Oliver wants to end the trip as soon as possible.
Taxiphone
Mario is an unemployed engineer, a victim of the economic crisis. Discouraged by job advertisements that do not reflect his capabilities and demoralized by numerous financial deadlines, he decides to organize the heist of the century. The police has just stored in a military facility the largest quantity of cannabis ever seized in Switzerland, and it will be burned shortly. Mario plans to substitute it with common hay without anybody noticing: if the evidence simply disappears, so does the crime... Searching for trustworthy members of his gang, Mario brings together Ivan, Augusto, Leo, Monica and 'The Professor', each of them more desperate than the other and convinced to have found the 'green gold' that will change their lives.
Oro verde
“Many years ago, men and lions used to live in peace together and were allies. They protected each other. But little by little men forgot about their deal and in the end the lions did the same.” These are the words that Lionel’s dying grand-father whispered to him in his village in Africa. Lionel is an 11-year-old boy who leaves happily in Switzerland with his mother and step-father. During a school trip to the zoo, Lionel is irresistibly attracted to an old lion lying in a cage. The lion starts to communicate with him and asks him to find a way to set him free in order to go back to Africa. With the help of his best friend Federico and of his classmates, Lionel is determined to keep his promise…
Lionel
The Director Mohammed Soudani comes back to Algeria after 30 years with the photographer Michael von Graffenried to visit the Algerians he had photographed between 1991 and 2000 without them knowing it.
Guerre sans images - Algérie, je sais que tu sais
Unable to resist the allure of the quick fix, a young West African executive falls for the mirage of financial success, too spectacular to be honest.
Les guérisseurs
In West Africa during the late 17th century, King Adanggaman leads a war against his neighboring tribes, ordering his soldiers to torch enemy villages, kill the elderly and capture the healthy tribesmen to sell to the European slave traders. When his village falls prey to one of Adanggaman's attacks, Ossei manages to escape, but his family is murdered except for his captured mother. Chasing after the soldiers in an effort to free her, Ossei is befriended by a fierce warrior named Naka.
Adanggaman
A trip that will take us to 7 African countries (Ghana, Senegal, Rwanda, Mozambique, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Burundi) to meet powerful women determined to do everything possible to offer a better future to the African people. These women will explain how they think they are working to save the continent, which must resolutely embrace integration into the world economy because the years of totalitarian male rule in Africa have been catastrophic. A film that will make us understand that the future of Africa belongs to women.
Women's Africa
Milan, like Paris or Stuttgart, and like many other European cities, is the theater of the drama of immigration. Demba reconstructs his story and that of his brother Yaro, both Senegalese immigrants in Italy, in a long and fragmentary flashback that begins with Yaro’s murder and recounts their departure from the village, arrival in Europe, the work they find selling lighters and picking tomatoes in the south of Italy: the stages every “non-EEC citizen” goes through in Italy.
Waalo Fendo - Where the Earth Freezes
A West African pig farmer has a religious vision, wherein he is told that he'll be Magloire the First, a prophet of Christ. He then sets out to rid his local villagers of superstition and instead save them for Jesus.
In the Name of Christ
SinopsisAfrica ought to live, telling stories, Africa needs to love itself today, Africa has to resist and the best weapon is ist culture, ist identity. A film is like a lourney where meetings occur. From the land of the pharaos to the countries where ebony is hidden – storytellers.