This Carte Blanche combines cinematographic works and artworks. What do these works have in common? They were brought to life by visionary artists and filmmakers, who withdrew themselves from the classical forms of telling stories and explored their own invented language while creating new territories through images. 

Their other common point: they are political works. Whether they are video-art, short and feature documentaries, sci-fi or computer-generated animation. They tell the stories of people that have been, and are still, oppressed, dehumanised, marginalised, forgotten or even erased. Those people, and their stories, need to be seen for what they bring to our world. The heterogeneity of form and cinematic language of these films do not seek to simply fill the screen to illustrate stories, but constitute a mirror that offers reflections on colonisation, displacement, exile, immigration, memory, geopolitics, diasporic identity and state control. While watching these films, spectators will be transported away from their reality, traveling between past, present and future - experiencing joy and humour as a form of resistance. They’ll witness a conversation between a Palestinian woman and the Lunar Embassy, They’ll discover a reconstituted Parisian nightclub that served as a refuge for the Arab population in the 80’s, they’ll find themselves inside the body particules of a young North-African man assaulted by the French police while on a date, they’ll travel from a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean, to a land made of flowers and silence, passing by a dystopian Palestine as a skyscraper and landscapes made of wild food plants and a daily struggle against land dispossession. 

Lina Soualem

Operation supported by the Ministère de l'Europe et des Affaires étrangères and the Institut Français as part of the international promotion strategy for cultural and creative industries through the PICC program.