Malik Berkati

A major work in the history of cinema, particularly in the development of feminist film and the critique of Hollywood narrative conventions. It is a model for deconstructing Hollywood codes and a landmark of feminist film theory, while also employing experimental visual and sonic forms. It revisits Puccini's narrative, "La Bohème," and grants Mimi—the doomed protagonist—the ability to question and explore the reasons for her death herself.

Adapted from a novella by Heinrich Böll, the film is a pioneering work that confronts German memory with its Nazi past through a radical formal approach, both aesthetic and political. It highlights the moral bankruptcy of an entire segment of society, incapable of any critical self-reckoning.

The shooting of Scénarios was completed the day before the filmmaker's assisted suicide. It is therefore Godard's final project, consciously conceived to be posthumous: a last look at his creative process, which he presents as a collage and a clashing of texts and images, with cuts that fracture reality and fiction; and literally, Godard's final look towards us, captured on camera as he stares into the lens the day before his self-chosen departure.

The collective Les Insoumuses, composed of Nadja Ringart, Carole Roussopoulos, Delphine Seyrig, and Ioana Wieder, understood early on that video was the medium that would allow those denied access to dominant communication channels to appropriate the image and tell their own stories. This was in an era where the appropriation and dissemination of women's voices was systematically overshadowed by men, who not only monopolized public expression but also subsumed all representation of the feminine and the masculine in society. This film sets the tone for the collective's productions: humor, irreverence, and inventiveness are the driving forces of their cinematic and activist collaboration.

A stranger navigates through his memories of youth in Bulgaria, unspooling them like a ball of yarn that sometimes knots and tangles, always and inevitably returning him to the one feeling that seems never to leave him, regardless of the moment in his life: the melancholy of uprootedness, which reaches its peak after his migration to Canada. The Physics of Sorrow is a technical tour de force, visually stunning, and its formal aspect is integral to the narrative. While the film is dedicated to the filmmaker's father, who was a painter, the technique used echoes the bond between them: the encaustic painting technique, which is extremely difficult and had never before been used for an animated film.

It is February 1993, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in Strpci. A passenger train is stopped by Bosnian Serb paramilitary forces looking for non-Serb passengers. As they detain Bosnian Muslim passengers, only one man among the train's 500 occupants stands up to them. This placing of the audience in the situation is powerfully accomplished within a suffocating, anxiety-inducing single setting, where the faces act as psychological landscapes, mirroring the events unfolding before our eyes. The director masterfully controls the narrative, using his camera as a writer uses a pen.

The young Algerian filmmaker and multimedia artist courageously engages in a metaphorical narrative, a dive into the psyche of a country built on layers of trauma linked to colonialism and terrorism. Ghyzlène Boukaïla films her main protagonist, Cheikh Morad Djadja, an iconic raï singer from Oran, from a distance during his nocturnal pilgrimage. His goal is to reach a public payphone, a place of anonymous telecommunication, which will allow him to leave a voicemail about his identity. Ghyzlène Boukaïla masterfully handles the dialectic of full and empty, public and private space, interior and exterior.

More relevant than ever, the twin brothers' film is part of a tradition representing war and resistance through the intimate, which gives its message a universalist dimension: through the destiny and daily life of individuals, viewers can see themselves or at least engage with the question of what they would do in their place. With a minimalist approach, Condom Lead portrays a couple trying to preserve their intimacy despite constant bombing during the "Cast Lead" operation in Gaza. The question of the future and the possibility of living in a shattered world is even more dizzying today than it was in 2013.

A departure from the traditional codes of Japanese anime, this animation embraces a graphic and narrative sobriety to address the themes of memory, grief, and loneliness with profound simplicity and sensitivity. An old man lives in a town slowly being submerged by water. He survives by building new floors, one cube upon another. But when his pipe falls into the water, he dives to retrieve it. As he descends into the depths, each level he passes unveils a new wave of memories.

In a cinematic gesture of narrative and aesthetic independence from colonial and neocolonial cinema, Ousmane Sembène laid the groundwork for his future work and for the emergence of an autonomous African cinema, which carries a unique perspective on the continent. The film offers an unvarnished image of the daily life of common people in post-independence Dakar, seen through the figure of a cart driver who transports clients and goods. Far from the official discourse that prevailed after colonization, the film shows the persistence of injustice, poverty, and ethnic and class racism.