Stank

Raulhac, Cantal, France, September 1, 1905. In the forest surrounding his hometown, the young seminarian Bruno Reidal murders a child and then surrenders himself to the authorities.

Beirut, Lebanon. Hassan is assembling wooden boards. His wife is dead. He is building her coffin. Tamara and Rami, the children, in their twenties, are helping him as best they can to fulfill her last wish: to be buried in her childhood village, abandoned for more than 20 years.

Four days of joy and friendship in a village in the Pyrenees. The festivities intensify life together, and cinema glorifies it.

On August 4, 2020, an explosion devastated the port of Beirut and part of the city. Two hundred people lost their lives. Five thousand were seriously injured. Three hundred thousand were displaced. Following the disaster, we set out to find three port workers who had appeared in one of our films ten years earlier.

Lebanon today. The traces of the civil war are all too tangible as government corruption becomes unbearable. In a country where conflict and peace are caught in an endless cycle, musicians from different backgrounds pool their talents to create an underground music scene. Each evokes his or her representation of Lebanon: its shifting geographical, political, historical and social borders, its painful passage through conflict and instability. A touching portrait of a young generation trying to build an oasis in a hostile environment where the forces of destruction continue to wreak havoc.

Fifteen years after giving up his studies as a botanist, the filmmaker decides to visit his old professor — Julio Betancur — and returns to the tropical forests of Colombia with Julio and his new disciple, the young Cristian Castro. This reunion launches a voyage that immerses us in doubts over science and the way we see the world, as Julio and Cristian look for their beloved plants in remote forests. Through their work, the film shows us the importance of legacies, and the strength of that ancient bond between master and disciple. Their search also prompts a personal reflection on modern man’s obsession with controlling and mapping nature. In the diverse and nearly infinite world of the tropics, what is the point of counting plants forever?

In the North Finistère, in Brittany, it’s late October, the low season. It’s Célèste’s last day of work as a caretaker at a seaside camping ground. Just as she’s getting ready to leave, a child disappears…

Beirut, Lebanon 2017. As the country trembles a man decides to attempt to break the world record of depth in deep diving.

Four teenagers from a Paris suburb participate in an audiovisual education project in which they become improvised reporters for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. An unforgettable experience puts them face to face with a completely different social reality from theirs, as well as the birth of new friendships and the discovery of new feelings.

Titou will soon be forty. He lives high up in a sheep shed in the Corbières mountains. With Soledad, who lives in a nearby caravan, they make their own wine, compose their music, live their love in step with the seasons – much as you might cultivate resistance.

In 1927, filmmaker Oskar Fischinger traveled for three weeks along the side roads between Munich and Berlin, filming frame by frame the people he met along the way and the places he passed through. In 2020, the director did a remake of this film during a month-long walk between Paris and Brest.

In the Serranía de la Macarena, in the north of the Colombian Amazon, lies “Río Rojo”, a mythical river that runs through the middle of the forest, also called “the river of the seven colors”. Young Oscar, grandmother Doña María and the Indian Sabino live peacefully in the region, in communion with nature. But this area, once preserved by the conflict with FARC, is now victim of its beauty and threatened by the arrival of new visitors…

“In Sofia, the residents of a mythical building had been evicted. I had come to hunt for film locations.” After this brief introductory title card, we discover what makes this Bulgarian building mythical, why its residents were evicted and how location-hun­ting turned into a film.