In the wings of the opera “Maraina”, the film combines history and oral memory, to recount in music the Europeans’ first contacts with the natives of the Indian Ocean islands, made of violence and love stories. Between the XVIIth century and today, this historical road movie follows the cast’s fantastic journey to the place where it all began – Fort-Dauphin, in southern Madagascar.
How do the Palestinian and Israeli (Arab and Jewish) education systems teach the history of their nations? The film follows several Israeli and Palestinian teachers over one academic year. Through observing their exchanges and confrontations with students, debates with the ministries curriculum and its restrictions, the viewers obtain an intimate glimpse into the profound and long lasting effect that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict transmits onto the next generation.
“The Chinese make things, the Malagasy fix them.” Just for the time of a film, let’s have fun reversing roles… Let’s imagine it isn’t for the economists anymore to demonstrate their growth model, but for the farmers, artists, craftsmen, and streetwise sellers of all kind to showcase their skills. There are those who recycle tires into shoes, those who make lamps from sweetened condensed milk cans, those who transform zebu bones that were left by the stray dogs into soap and medication. In Madagascar, proverbs, music and recycling skills challenge economics with humour!
A consulting service is located in the Avicenne Hospital in Bobigny. It’s an outpost at the end of a corridor. A large, run-down room where sick men show up bearing physical scars, and whose pain seems closely linked to the suffering of exile. They keep coming back here because they still harbor hopes that this place will give them the means to stay afloat, to survive the turmoil of their lives hitting rock bottom.
Perma gold mine, Benin. Some dream to find something, others realized there was nothing to be found. Some dig relentlessly hoping to become rich, others died in the process. And a few of them say that here, nobody dies.