Villa Madjo

A Story-A Story

June 1973 •English

Ananse the Spider Man climbs up to the sky to buy stories from the Sky God in this folktale from Africa.

The day he decided to leave

August 2015 •Portuguese

My grandfather Tuiu decides for the second time to leave his house and start a life elsewhere, he lives with the street hardships, and the fact of leaving is linked to the depredation of that place.

The Aryans

April 2014 •German

THE ARYANS is Mo Asumang's personal journey into the madness of racism during which she meets German neo-Nazis, the US leading racist, the notorious Tom Metzger and Ku Klux Klan members in the alarming twilight of the Midwest. In The ARYANS Mo questions the completely wrong interpretation of "Aryanism" - a phenomenon of the tall, blond and blue-eyed master race.

Druids: The Mystery of Celtic Priests

June 2021 •German

Druids have existed far longer than hitherto assumed, since the 4th century BC. Their traces are found all over middle Europe: from the northern Balkans to Ireland. Their cultural achievements were equal in almost every way to those of the Romans and Greeks: They could read and write and spoke Greek and Latin - for centuries, they were the powerful elite of their culture. Only one single Druid is known by name to history: Diviciacos - an aristocrat of the Aedui and personal friend of Julius Caesar. Diviciacos was a politician, a judge and a diplomat, but he lived at a time when the Celtic lands of Gaul were conquered by the Romans. Greek and Roman contemporaries distrusted the actions of this forbear of the famous comic book druid Getafix: They imagined him in bloody rituals in somber woods.

CHoosing at Twenty

August 2017 •French

Between 1954-1962, one hundred to three hundred young French people refused to participate in the Algerian war. These rebels, soldiers or conscripts were non-violent or anti-colonialists. Some took refuge in Switzerland where Swiss citizens came to their aid, while in France they were condemned as traitors to the country. In 1962, a few months after Independence, Villi Hermann went to a region devastated by war near the Algerian-Moroccan border, to help rebuild a school. In 2016 he returned to Algeria and reunited with his former students. He also met French refractories, now living in France or Switzerland.

Wanda

Invalid date •English

School lunch chef Wanda McAfee-Conart reflects in her job and how it connects her to the sensory environment and to her own family history.

Elle va crier

February 2025 •French

Audrey, a woman in her mid-fifties, has never been able to make peace with her tumultuous family history. A clumsy mother, an emotionally distant father and sexual assaults that have gone unreported. She now decides to confront her demons. Supported by her son, the director of the documentary, she revisits a striking scene from her past: the moment when she told her parents that her grandfather had raped her. Together, through a year-long production process, they transform this awkward exchange into a moment of communion, thanks to actors, a set and Audrey's desire to do herself justice.

Two Lives for Algeria and All the Wretched of the Earth

January 2025 •French

In 1994, at over seventy years old, Gilberte and William Sportisse, threatened by the FIS, arrived from Algeria. Of Jewish faith, he of Arabic mother tongue, they formed a fighting couple, started for the independence of Algeria, always with an unshakeable faith in humanity. They enjoy recounting the participation of Algerian Jews in the Second World War and the struggle for Algerian independence. They provide us with previously unpublished information on the public and clandestine struggles of the Algerian Communist Party before and after independence, and on the repression of activists who, like William and Gilberte Sportisse, were tortured and imprisoned after Colonel Boumédiène came to power. The film is an ode to understanding between people of different origins or cultures and a tribute to a couple whose youthful character and enthusiasm still astonish.

Up the Yangtze

September 2007 •Chinese

At the edge of the Yangtze River, not far from the Three Gorges Dam, young men and women take up employment on a cruise ship, where they confront rising waters and a radically changing China.

Pierre Clément, Cinéma et Révolution

October 2023 •Arabic

Pierre Clément, student and photographer of René Vauthier, first accompanied him to Tunisia to make a film on the country's independence in 1957. Destiny led him to Algeria and his presence in February 1958 at the Tunisian-Algerian border changed his life. . Forever. He took his camera and photographed the attacks on Sakia Sidi Youssef before committing himself body and soul to the Algerian cause. Shortly after, he directed the film “Algerian Refugees” before being arrested, tortured and imprisoned, while his third film, “The National Liberation Army in Almaki”, was not finished. Abdel Nour Zahzah, a director who commemorates Pierre Clément, the director who risked his life, the brother of the Algerian resistance, who disappeared in 2007.

Reclamation: The Rise at Standing Rock

Invalid date •English

Nominated for an Emmy® Award in 2021 for best non fiction special. Winner of 35 grand jury awards. Filmed in 2016 at Standing Rock, North Dakota, this powerful documentary follows the Indigenous leaders as they unite the Native Nations for the first time in 150 years in order to rise up in spiritual solidarity against the unlawful Dakota Access Pipeline which threatens their treaty lands, sacred burial sights and clean water. These young Native Leaders honor their destiny by implementing a peaceful movement of resistance which awakens the world.

Guns of Freedom

January 1961 •Arabic

This docu-fiction recounts the difficulties overcome by an ALN ​​detachment whose perilous mission is to transport weapons and ammunition from Tunisia across the Algerian Sahara during the Algerian liberation war (1954-1962) against the French army of occupation.

The Trouble with Merle

August 2002 •English

The director explores the birth origins of actress Merle Oberon, traveling to Tasmania and India in search of the truth, but her quest ultimately results in probably more questions than it answers.

Tokyo Phoenix

May 2017 •French

In 150 years, twice marked by total destruction —a terrible earthquake in 1923 and incendiary bombings in 1945— followed by a spectacular rebirth, Tokyo, the old city of Edo, has become the largest and most futuristic capital in the world in a transformation process fueled by the exceptional resilience of its inhabitants, and nourished by a unique phenomenon of cultural hybridization.

Dear Albania

October 2015 •English

Eliza Dushku takes on her homeland of Albania.

Drinking a Monster in the parking lot of the clinic where I was born that is now a funeral home

November 2024 •English

A woman returns to the site of her birth, which is now a funeral home. She drinks a white monster energy drink.

The Family Forest

Invalid date •English

Epigenetics and psychogenealogy ​through a VERY personal experience.

An Unhealed Wound - The Harkis in the Algerian War

September 2010 •French

It's the unforgivable story of the two hundred thousands harkis, the Arabs who fought alongside the French in the bitter Algerian war, from 1954 to 1962. Why did they make that choice? Why were they slaughtered after Algeria's independence? Why were they abandonned by the French government? Some fifty to sixty thousands were saved and transferred in France, often at pitiful conditions. This is for the first time, the story of this tragedy, told in the brilliant style of the authors of "Apocalypse".

Les bouillons parisiens, une histoire de goût

January 2025 •French

La Bataille d'Alger, l'empreinte

January 2018 •French

Cheikh Djemaï looks back on the genesis of Gillo Pontecorvo’s feature film, The Battle of Algiers (1965). Through archive images, extracts from the film and interviews with personalities, the filmmaker retraces the journey of a major work - from the events of the Algiers Casbah (1956-1957) to the presentation of the Lion of 'Or causing the anger of the French delegation in Venice - which left its mark as much in the history of cinema as in that of Algeria.