Simone Bitton

The Thousand and One Days of Hajj Edmond

A former communist leader and activist for Moroccan independence, Edmond Amran Elmaleh left behind a vast body of literary work that masterfully articulates personal and collective memory. This cinematic letter, addressed to Elmaleh by director Simone Bitton, weaves together excerpts from the writer’s texts, testimonies, and archival images, and the filmmaker’s own words to illustrate the memory of a captivating and erudite man haunted by the parallel tragedies of the departure of Jews from Morocco and the exodus of Palestinians uprooted from their land.

Ziyara

Ziyara means visit to the saints, a popular practice common to both Jews and Muslims in Morocco. Today most of the Jews have left, but their saints are still there. The director goes to meet their guardians, humble and magnificent muslim caretakers of her Jewish memory. The wound of separation is still open, the echo of the Middle Eastern wars hunts silently the encounter, but the camera reweaves the link. It gathers stories, smiles, hospitality and blessings, carrying the film towards a new complicity between the filmer and those who are filmed.

Rachel

Rachel Corrie, a young American woman and her friends attempt to stop a bulldozer from clearing out some homes and other buildings. Corrie was run over and killed. Witnesses claim it was deliberate.

Rachel

Rachel Corrie, a young American woman and her friends attempt to stop a bulldozer from clearing out some homes and other buildings. Corrie was run over and killed. Witnesses claim it was deliberate.

Wall

A meditation on the separation fence in Israel-Palestine that imprisons one people while enclosing the other.

Wall

A meditation on the separation fence in Israel-Palestine that imprisons one people while enclosing the other.

Mahmoud Darwish: As the Land Is the Language

Accompanying from a place to another the poet who spent years in exile far from his native land of al-Birwa, in Haifa, Cyprus, Tunis, Amman, Paris, Cairo and Ramallah.

Conversation nord-sud : Daney/Sanbar

During the Gulf War, Serge Daney had written that the conversation, according to him "a typically Franco-Arab art", could no longer be established between him and his Arab friends. Saddened by this observation, we wanted to offer him a frame, both real and cinematographic, in which he could renew a dialogue that was interrupted at that moment. The choice of his interlocutor was immediately obvious: Elias Sanbar, Palestinian, historian, director of the magazine "Palestinian Studies", collector of images: an exile who archives the memory of his people: press photographs, album of family, postcards, etc. For Sanbar, the image is a proof of his identity. Daney spent most of his life watching movies, but has always refused to keep still images. On both sides, there was a very strong desire to confront these two attitudes in the face of the image and to make it, in a way, a parable of the North-South relations.

Palestine: Story of a Land

Using only rare archival and newsreel footage, this film tells the story of Palestine from the nineteenth century through current times.

Palestine: Story of a Land

Using only rare archival and newsreel footage, this film tells the story of Palestine from the nineteenth century through current times.

The Red Shade

The time is the 1930s and two Soviet spies (both Frenchmen by nationality) have been helping Communist factions during the Civil War in Spain. It is the time of Stalin's iron rule in the USSR, and the two agents are suddenly called to Moscow by the KGB. Knowing that they are in trouble for no fault of their own, fear drives one of them to suicide while the other gets his lover and her child and begins a run for his life, knowing that the KGB will never let him go free.

Solange Giraud, née Tache

Retrospective reportage on the life of an ordinary woman, which aims to analyse the domestic and social factors which contributed to her suicide.