The Mediterranean World

What has happened between the moment when a friend shared a melody with the filmmakers 15 years ago and the moment when it is taken up again today?

Bab Sebta is a series of reconstructed situations observed at Ceuta, the Spanish enclave on Moroccan soil. This site is the theater of the trafficking of goods manufactured and sold at cut-rate prices. Thousands of people work in it each day.

Moving to Beirut’s anarchic rhythm, Underdown follows the struggles of a Palestinian cab driver who lives in his car, a homeless Syrian kid and a Lebanese woman and her family.

Jean-René is a retired workman who has lived in Mâcon, France, since emigrating from Reunion Island at the age of 17. Today, for the first time ever, the quiet man recounts his story to his daughter.

Crop is an absorbing account of the Egyptian revolution of 2011 – one that includes no images of the popular uprising itself. Filmed entirely within the offices of Al-Ahram, the country’s largest state-run newspaper, the film is a series of carefully composed tableaux that expose the institution’s functioning and the former regime’s strict control over information.

A lyrical essay in five parts, Evaporating Borders is told through a series of vignettes that explore the lives of political and economic refugees on the island of Cyprus. The film explores the themes of displacement, belonging, identity, and migration.

Stationed is a story about a female soldier in a unit of combat stationed in the Old City of Hebron.

On the Western Mediterranean’s last prison island both guards and prisoners are isolated by the sea and are subject to the laws of justice. Thus, the guards see themselves as the real prisoners, while the inmates work to serve their sentence. For over 30 years, prison psychologist Giuseppe has accompanied the inmates in his unrefined manner, on their way to freedom, while he remains on the island.

A short black and white documentary depicting women in a mud-brick factory.

Syria. A body undulating in the wind, in the evening light, a graceful and fragile silhouette of a dancer filmed close to the skin. Such is what is stated, in reverse, in the project of this fi rst fi lm by Rafat Alzakout: beauty and the work of art as a guide for a fi lm shot in the turmoil of civil war while bodies become destroyed fl esh. We follow a small group of men including Ahmad the dancer, Taj the art teacher and former lieutenant, without forgetting, unseen but dialoguing with them, Alzakout...

In her feature documentary Syrian director Liwaa Yazji explores what it means to set off in a war. She meets friends and people previously unknown to her at their homes. Domiciles where they live now or where they yet live. Spaces that turned into a sought-after commodity.

Phases of Matter follows living and inanimate residents of a teaching hospital in Istanbul, moving from the operating room to the morgue, between life and other states, the real and the virtual.