François-Xavier Destors

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In 1968, young people from Berkeley to Paris and from Prague to Tokyo rose up against the world they were being offered. In this sprawling but riveting two-part documentary, veteran filmmaker Don Kent tracks the development, decline and legacy of this global movement against the fiery backdrop of the Vietnam War, civil rights struggles, dueling ideologies, and international coup d’états. A time capsule full of evocative sights and sounds, narrated by leading historians and political activists, Les années 68 effortlessly connects apparently discrete events to form a blazingly timely analysis of a decade that shaped the way we live now.

January 1953: On the eve of his death Stalin finds himself yet another imaginary enemy: Jewish doctors. He organizes the most violent anti-Semitic campaign ever launched in the USSR, by fabricating the "Doctors' Plot," whereby doctors are charged with conspiring to murder the highest dignitaries of the Soviet Regime. Still unknown and untold, this conspiracy underlines the climax of a political scheme successfully masterminded by Stalin to turn the Jews into the new enemies of the people. It reveals his extreme paranoia and his compulsion to manipulate those around him. The children and friends of the main victims recount for the first time their experience and their distress related to these nightmarish events.

Mandela’s legend is built on his absence, during his 27- year incarceration. In 1990, when Nelson Mandela is released, South Africa is waiting for their Messiah. But he doesn’t know it yet, he is the most famous political prisoner of the Planet. Will he be up to the challenge?

Numbi, a little village hidden deep in the Democratic Republic of Congo mountains, lies nonetheless at the heart of our world. Here, with their bare hands, miners dig the coltan which will find its way – legally or otherwise – to our industrialized world. For decades this grey gold, indispensable to the manufacture of almost all contemporary technological devices, has been the cause of conflicts and a bitter exploitation. In Numbi, bodies are covered in mud, hands red with blood, and coltan hides in every pocket. Every inhabitant lives with the illusory hope of escaping fate and enjoying for themselves the riches of the Congo. Sensitive, shocking and deeply moving, Of Mud and Blood documents the everyday existence of the inhabitant of Numbi, revealing the hardships and trials of a story from which we must not look away.

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Gaël was five years old when his mother, Didy, died. Memories of her have since been lost in the fury of the civil wars, genocide and AIDS that ravaged Burundi and then Rwanda, precipitating her exile to Switzerland. Thirty years on, he ventures to reopen the pages of his family history by meeting those who knew his mother.

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Norilsk is an impossible kind of place. In this Arctic city, winter lasts for nine months and temperatures plummet to -60°C. Norilsk Nickel, the first worldwide producer of copper and nickel, has dominated life since the city rose from the ashes of the Soviet gulag. More than 180,000 people manage to survive in this closed-off city isolated from the outside world. In looking at their extraordinary daily lives, this film paints a poetic portrait of an extreme city where everyone is looking for a way out.

"Better to die of cancer than of hunger," are words you may well hear on Priolo beach in Sicily. In the shadows of the lovely city of Syracuse lies one of Europe's largest petrochemical complexes. 70 years after the arrival of the first refineries, the area seems to have been abandoned to its fate as poison taints the sky, water and land. Woven around fragments supplied by residents who resist, are resigned or choose to look the other way, the film Toxic Sicily sets out to tell the tale of a place sacrificed on the altar of progress, modernity and globalisation.