Laurent Van Lancker

A film about the gift of re-membering what was dis-membered by the colonial project. Dreamscapes, ritualised practices of sharing and ancestral rhythms render visible the previously invisible lines that once held communities and ecosystems in sacred balance.

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Polyphony of tales by migrants who returned to their homeland after having spent many years abroad. This film proposes a haptic and sensorial evocation of lifestories and memories through filmic experimentations and traces of material culture.

Ymako Teatri, a theatre company based in the Ivory Coast, uses street theatre to question some contemporary West African problems. Their originality consists in using the ‘invisible theatre’ method in order to surprise the public and thus make it react itself to its own problems. This documentary shows how a local theatre company efficiently uses fiction to problematise today’s African reality. This film presents two performances, one criticises the current proliferation of religious sects, the other deals with the awakening of villagers towards AIDS. Ymako, in Bambara, means ‘our concerns’.

Once upon a journey, ten contemporary storytellers of different cultures create an imaginary epic story. They each draw on their own style and own language to prolong the life of a nameless hero. The aromas of cultures, the taste of words and the perfume of travelling carry us from one storyteller to the next. Like an epic story, this film oscillates between imagination and reality, the inner world and the outside world, documentary and fiction.

Sharing the daily life of migrants, on numerous visits during the entire duration of the 'jungle', and often using a collaborative methodology (images and narrations partly produced by the migrants), the director Laurent Van Lancker, proposes a film that is both poetical and political, evoking an untold and internal perception on the faculty of adaptation and social life of migrants.