Ellen Meiresonne

Photographer and visual artist Sammy Baloji’s fascinating film essay explores the Democratic Republic of Congo’s colonial history and its ecological significance. Drawing on research from the 1930s, the film highlights the Congo Basin’s vital role in consuming carbon dioxide and shaping global environmental balance over a century.

Between segregation and cosmic revelation, The Magic City traces the birth of Sun Ra, where a city becomes myth and a man, a galaxy.

Melrick is an unruly young boy who spends his summer in French Guiana at his grandmother's house to escape his turbulent daily life in Stains, France. At the end of his stay, he plays the drum to revive the memory of his late uncle, Lucas Diomar, who died in tragic circumstances. Despite a wave of murders of young men shaking the headlines, Melrick becomes aware of his place in a family destroyed by irreparable grief.

A psychotherapist (Charlotte Rampling) listens to archive testimonies from her former patients. Their words mingle with images of a journey across the Arctic aboard a sailboat. Among these stories, the therapist recounts her own path through psychosis.

Agadez, a desert city in northern Niger, is weighed down by geopolitical interests and the harsh European border policy. The filmmaker weaves testimonies of three courageous women who each, in their own way, try to confront this reality. They speak about their work, their role in the community, and how they put solidarity into practice. Their inspiring stories offer a glimpse of a feminism that is not theoretical, but rooted in everyday life—a feminism that is truly practiced and lived.

In Fabrizio Terranova’s film, Donna Haraway – an original thinker and activist, one of the founders of cyberfeminism and the author of A Cyborg Manifesto, which proposed a number of innovative theories about the existence of scientific knowledge – calls for the abandonment of the idea of human exceptionalism and for a conception of the world as complex web of interconnections between people, animals and machines. Jellyfish can be seen flying around her home while she discusses the stories that are necessary for Earth’s preservation and reads her fantastic tale of the art of survival on a broken planet, and of fusion and care between the species.

Lies and guilt are at the core of Patrick’s relationship with his mother Randa. Over the years, he has collected their audio messages and video calls, transforming them into a portrait of her life in Lebanon and his own in Belgium. This very intimate yet social piece reveals a complex relationship marked by the distance between the two characters and shows what one may experience as a homosexual migrant. By turns moving, provocative, and hilarious, Mea Culpa questions the links between national and sexual identities for a young Palestinian migrant.

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Castiglione d'Otranto, in the South of Italy. A group of thirty-year-olds no longer accept that the solution to the economic, ecological and political problems of the territory is always "to leave". They propose to the villagers who own pieces of uncultivated land, often felt as a burden, to put them in common. They decide to stay, to link their lives to the land and to invest in a value: being together. Castiglione becomes the village of restance. They cultivate ancient seeds and local biodiversity, they make decisions together, they develop a local economy. Accepting the shadows of the past, another potential of the place is rediscovered.

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Amid the buildings and streets of Ramallah, men take up positions. In a continuous, unedited shot, the camera witnesses a confrontation between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers illegally stationed in the city. With a single gesture, the viewer experiences the occupation of Palestinian territory in real time.

A young man walks through the winter in search of a love encounter with another man, and in search of the presence of Christ. Signal GPS perdu tells the story of his inner journey by combining the snowy landscapes of the Jura, a medieval courtly text, and a gay dating application on a smartphone.

In Oliena, Sardinia, local legends seem to have disappeared from people’s memories. But the songs, the olive trees, and the fires of San Giovanni evoke them powerfully. Filmmaker Myriam Raccah thus decides to re-enact some of these stories with the help of the villagers, creating a marvellous fresco that unleashes the magic of storytelling and cinema.