The Exiles

The tragedy of the Syrian people: War, conflict, loss, migration, exile, asylum, detention, drowning… A deserted place. Abandoned people. Abandoned country. The doors slammed shot; the doors are now locked - the keys thrown away...for what seems forever.

Due to the measures taken by the government, students have fewer and fewer prospects for a meaningful future. Life is on pause and society is kept in fear. The confidence in a bright future is gone. Even after 18 months, there is still no light at the end of the tunnel. The many promises have not yet changed this situation. In this moving documentary, young people give an idea of the impact of the measures on their lives. Is there still hope or has the damage already been done?

The film situates the viewer within a makeshift space of an animal market in Algeria. Drifting between feeding and waiting, one attunes to the bodies of goats and camels, the oldest companions of Arab men. As we move deeper into the desert, the site turns into a sacrifice zone and reveals its dark geopolitical secrets. The sensory ethnography film will invite you to question the banality of displacement, confinement and exploitation in an out-of-sight territory.

From Scotland to Ecuador, passing through Canada, Spain and Angola, 21 young Cubans who grew up in 9 countries outside the island tell their experiences of adaptation living between two cultures and the survival of the Cuban identity despite their stories of familial rupture and alienation.

The filmmaker’s grandmother moved into this house in 1971. When Rolande Ségalini died, everything remained as it was during her lifetime. But what to do with all the accumulated things? As her granddaughter Céline begins to film this material legacy, she realises that her grandmother has remained an enigma to her to this day. Room by room, she inventories, classes, counts, sorts the possessions retrieved from wardrobes, drawers, cabinets and boxes and arranges the objects into new still lives. It is an attempt to understand the deceased woman better and find out more about her. Step by step, the heiress discovers various connections to France’s colonial history.

Anna, a twelve-year-old Ukrainian gymnast, has fled her war-torn country and recently settled in Montreal with her mother, younger brother, and grandmother. Confronted by the past, the challenges of exile, and a deep need for belonging, she seeks to rebuild her identity and regain her balance. Through her child’s perspective, the documentary explores the reality of life after war, questioning what endures and what is missing, even when one has found refuge.

In the Land That Is Like You is a progress on the tracks of my lost past, with the contact of my mother, my grandmother and the man who I love, in a country which escapes from me and retains me, Lebanon.

In the 1970s, Agustín Gómez Arcos rose to the top of French literature, while in his own country, Spain, his name remained hidden. A Free Man reflects on the recent history of Spain through silences, lost stories and the role of culture and memory.

Only women, children and old people live in this Armenian village, while the men work in Russia. A life with a rhythm of its own, an independent daily life marked nonetheless by exile.

Wangala is a short documentary about women's resistance to the Moroccan occupation. Samira was born in the camps, in the middle of the desert, the only place that was given to them after the arrival of the invader. Through the concepts of torture, refuge and exile, we try to create a mosaic of experiences that explain the current situation of Sahrawi refugees in the camps, in exile and in the occupied territory.

Citizen Film created a short film in collaboration with the National Writing Project, for classroom use. The film models a “better argument” between MoveOn co-founder Joan Blades and Tea Party Patriots co-founder Mark Meckler. The National Writing Project is disseminating the film to thousands of classroom teachers around the country along with prompts for reflection, dialogue and persuasive writing inspired by this short film. After viewing the film, students discuss its themes. They choose a theme to write about and their instructor guides them to craft an argument that is not only well researched, but also addresses a wide audience, including people who hold positions ideologically opposed to their own.

Ali Salem Hamudi Mohamed - Yahdih, was born in 1955 in El Aaiún (Western Sahara). He completed his secondary schooling in the "Spanish" Sahara. A scholarship allowed him to enrol at the Universidad de la Peninsula in 1975, but Morocco's invasion of the Sahara led him to return to the city of his birth and go into exile with his people, participating in the resistance and helping to organise the Tindouf Refugee Camps (Algeria). In 1980, the Polisario Front and the Government of Cuba offered him the opportunity to study Architecture at the University of Havana. On his return to the Camps in 1985 he worked for the SADR's Department of Construction. He designed more than twenty public buildings, including town halls, schools and nursery schools, and also collaborated with international aid organisations to build hospitals and training colleges. All of these buildings were built collectively by the Saharan people. ;In 1999 he emigrated to Spain. His family joined him five years later.

Dos Islas is a poetic story about old age, family and the bond between a granddaughter and a grandmother. The woman, who just turned 102, tells stories about her past and childhood. In a literary and visual way she describes the most minute details. The film dazzles the viewer with love and optimism, the time passes slowly between the two islands, which might be real people, real places or the products of the main character’s imagination.

Saud now lives in Paris, caring with devotion and tenderness for his two young children while closely following the drama in Gaza. “It's hard to be far away.” He speaks sadly of his situation as a Palestinian citizen of Israel. When he accompanies his daughter to school, they both stick up placards for the liberation of Palestine...

To tell the story of Joseph Kessel is to tell the story of the entire 20th century. He lived a thousand lives in one: reporter, novelist, exile, resistance fighter, screenwriter, adventurer, gambler, poet, alcoholic, cabaret lover, seducer, and inveterate globetrotter. Through archival footage and Kessel's colorful language, this film traces the journey of a man who turned reporting into an epic and reality into the stuff of novels.