Julien Goudichaud

Sofia and Nigina. They’re Afghans, beautiful, proud, best friends, despite themselves and without knowing it - icons of Kabul’s idle youth. Behind the curtains of their beauty salon, the exterior of which has been ransacked by the Taliban, they support a small team and a dream: to protect their last space of freedom. Their salon is situated in central Kabul. Around twenty employees work there, seven days a week. It’s a sanctuary for women: a place where men do not enter. We began filming the day after the Taliban came to power on August 15, 2021. For a year and a half, as the extremists impose new laws on Afghans, especially women, we follow the two friends in their beauty salon and across the Afghan capital: in a park where they are the only ones who still dare to show their faces; on the hilltops where they learn to drive in secret… And then, on the road to exile. The repression becomes too suffocating, too violent. The young women’s quest for lightness becomes a plan of escape…

Every year, thousands risk their lives to illegally reach England on rubber dinghies from Calais. It is a perilous crossing, at the mercy of smugglers, on the dangerous waters of the English Channel. Women, men, and children from Syria, Iran, and Sudan. Director Julien Goudichaud spent seven years walking the beaches of Calais, documenting what was happening there and talking to migrants and those who manage the trafficking. He ended up making the crossing himself, camera in hand, with the exiles, to understand and show what it means.

Spring 2020, a global pandemic hits humanity. In an empty and silent Paris, there remain “urban ghosts”, Sarah, Nelson, and Katia, who have no other choice but to be locked out, asking the question: how do you continue to survive in a world at a standstill?