Valérie Montmartin

Séraphine

Paris, Montmartre, 1883. Seraphine, 12 years old, leaves a monotoneous life with Jeanne, the grumpy seamstress who raised her. She is obsessed with finding out who her parents were. Flanked with Mistigri, a street child whom she takes under her wing, Séraphine retraces the secret of her origins and finds it in the battles led by the people of Montmartre.

Coexistence, My Ass!

Comedian Noam Shuster Eliassi's one-woman show tackles the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the struggle for equality, challenging audiences with uncomfortable truths when her pursuit of coexistence starts sounding absurd.

Farming the Revolution

Amidst COVID lockdowns, India’s farmers rise up on an unprecedented scale against unjust new laws. Over half a million protesters—men and women from all generations, religions, classes and castes—gather and reinvent co-existence while winning a rare victory over the state.

Russian Gas and the Nenets

In the heart of the Arctic, the Yamal peninsula is the world’s largest gas exploitation zone, a symbol of Russia’s energy hyperpower, which caused the appetite of oil corporations. But the Yamal peninsula is also the ancestral home of the Nenets, who have been pasturing here with their droves for over 200 generations. Every year the nomads undertake a journey of 1500 km. But for how much longer can they survive? Today in Yamal, pastures have given way to gas fields. Growing towns, a railway, an airport, the deep scars on the landscape caused by extraction of gas and oil, and the new nuclear-powered icebreakers, which will create busy shipping lanes in the Arctic, are all changing the local ecosystem. With the industry dramatically modifying the landscape, accelerating the effects of global warming, the Nenets way of life is under threat. The documentary gives a unique insight into a vanishing way of life, enhanced by stunning aerial footage, and rare access to an extraordinary people.

Nicole Kidman: Eyes Wide Open

Over the years, Nicole Kidman, Oscar and two-time Emmy Award winner, became both a pop culture icon & a complex dramatic actress. Her career is a unique body of work that mirrors her personal life, which is more political than it might seem.

Magaluf Ghost Town

At the height of the summer tourist season, the Spanish beach town Magaluf turns into a hellscape of the low-cost travel industry. For eight weeks every year, over one million mostly British vacationers ride an alcohol-soaked tide of public urination, fisticuffs and ambulance sirens for recreation. Instead of assembling a clip-reel of "balconing," when drunk idiots jump into hotel pools from their balconies, filmmaker Miguel Ángel Blanca crafts a far deeper and atmospheric look at a place where visitors and locals alike are driven by pleasure. Long-time resident Maria has little time left, so she takes in a seasonal lodger who listens to her relive her glory days. An enterprising real estate agent peddles an extravagant development, while a young gay man drifts without any plans beyond robbing a tourist for kicks. Part ghost story, part foreboding parable, this is a stylish and vivid impression of people and a place dreaming of escape. Myrocia Watamaniuk (Hot Docs)

A Marble Travelogue

Blocks of white marble from a Greek quarry are shipped to China, where sculptors turn them into Hellenistic-style statues and columns. The leftover grit is processed into fridge magnets and other souvenirs, which are returned to Europe and sold to Chinese tourists.

Taiwan: A Digital Democracy in China's Shadow

One Country, Two Systems? No Way! say the youth of Taiwan. But China under President Xi Jinping wants more than ever to bring the island of Taiwan back into the fold, just like Hong Kong. Can the burgeoning democracy on China’s doorstep, driven by digital technology, resist the Middle Kingdom’s advances? To China Taiwan is a breakaway province that must return to the fold. To its 24 million inhabitants it is a sovereign state with its own constitution and democratically elected leaders. Now that Hong Kong has been brought into line, Taiwan remains determined to stand up as a vibrant, young democracy. But it won't be easy. Since the Sunflower Movement in 2014 when the young came out to prevent an economic agreement with China, citizen groups have been fighting for the transparency of institutions.

Democracy for $ale

In the United States of America, lobbyists, corporations and billionaires invest millions of dollars to ensure that a suitable candidate, one inclined to support their personal ambitions and economic projects, wins an election, which inevitably affects everything, from the selection of local officials to presidential elections, creates countless conflicts of interest and undermines what supposedly used to be a model democracy.

#387

This is the story of a Greek physician who collects pendants and bracelets. This is the story of an Italian woman who has been fighting for 15 years to «make bodies talk.» This is the story of those who watch over the forgotten migrants.

L'argent de la terreur

Documentary about the financial resources of the Islamic State.

Hong Kong: Retrocession Generation

In 2017, twenty years after the British handed over Hong Kong to China in 1997, young people, more politicized than any previous generation and proud of their land, do not feel Chinese and actively fight against the oligarchs who want to subdue them to China's authoritarian power.

The Forgotten Nuclear Victims

A documentary on nuclear victims. From 1950 to 1990, France, the USA, and the UK dropped hundreds of nuclear bombs on the Pacific islands, at the cost of sacrificing the local populations. Each country played the clock and hoped for the silent disappearance of the victims of the first generation. But the atom left more traces than expected; genetic abnormalities and pathologies appeared in new generations.