Category "Mediterranean Challenges"

Canto per Cheikh by Fulvio Toffoli

Production: Elisabetta Caracciolo & Etabeta | Country: Italy | Year: 2005 | Duration: 50'
Synopsis: Canto per Cheikh is a modern African fairy tale, telling about emigration. It's sad because of the death of an African boy, Cheikh, who lived far away from his country and who died saving an Italian boy from the sea waves…

La traversée by Elisabeth Leuvrey

Production: Alice Films | Country: France | Year: 2006 | Duration: 55'
Synopsis: Every summer, many people cross the Mediterranean sea between France and Algeria. The closed space of the ship and the long time of the trip give us the opportunity to discover these men and women, talking about the different aspects of immigration…

Les reines du roi by Hicham Ayouch

Production: Gloria Films | Country: France | Year: 2005 | Duration:52'
Synopsis: In Morocco a law concerning the family's code has strongly marked the public opinion, because of its changes, in particular about the women's condition. Some  women’ s histories made us thinking about the new aspects of this law, based on sexual equality…

Men on the Edge by Faingulernt & Abramzon Avner & Macabit

Production: Avner Faingulernt & Macabit Abramzon | Country: Israel | Year: 2005 | Duration: 90'
Synopsis: On the borderline between Gaza and Israel lies an isolated beach where Israeli and Palestinians fishermen live and fish together. The Palestinians teach the Israelis their antique fishing experience; but without the presence of the Israelis, the Palestinians are not allowed to fish in the Israeli waters...

Mur by Simone Bitton

Production: Cine Sud Promotion | Country: France/Israel | Year: 2004 | Duration: 100'
Synopsis: Wall (Mur) is a cinematic meditation on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which the filmmaker blurs the lines of hatred by asserting her double identity as Jew and Arab. In an original documentary approach, the film follows the separation fence that is destroying one of the most historically significant landscapes in the world, while imprisoning one people and enclosing the other…

Oyun by Esmer Pelin

Production: Sinefilm | Country: Turkey | Year: 2005 | Duration: 70'
Synopsis: Nine women living in Arslankoy, a mountain village in southern Turkey, spend their days working hard in the fields, on the construction site and at home. To lighten the burden of life, they meet together and the idea to write and perform a play based on their own life stories come out…

Category "Memories of the Mediterranean"

Dopo Srebrenica by Andrea Rossini

Production:Osservatorio sui Balcani | Country: Italy | Year: 2005 | Duration: 33'
Synopsis: In a summer of ten years ago, the Bosnian Serb Army occupied the Srebrenica enclave. This town was declared “safe area” by the United Nations’ Security Council. Although, over 8.000 Bosnian Muslim prisoners were killed and buried in mass graves…

Le Testament de Tibhirine by Emmanuel Audrain

Production: Mille et une films | Country: France | Year: 2006 | Duration: 52'
Synopsis: Seven monks were killed on May 1996 in Tibhirine, an Algerian town. They had decided to stay in Algeria even if they had been threatened since many years. Ten years later, some closed friends remember this episode…

L'OAS by Ali Ayadi

Production: ENTV | Country: Algeria | Year: - | Duration:63'

Synopsis: This documentary, through witnesses, images and eloquent archive photos, shows the period from March to June 1962, in which Algerians showed bravery and ability facing the OAS (Organisation de l'Armée Secrète), a clandestine political and military organisation basing its action on terrorism acts…

Massaker by Monika Borgmann

Production: Unlimited | Country: Germany | Year: 2004 | Duration: 98'
Synopsis: From the 16th to 18th September 1982, for two nights and three days, Sabra and Chatila, the strongholds of the civilian, political and military presence of Palestinians in Lebanon were put into fire. After more than twenty years, six men who took part  to this massacre, remember those days…

Salonique, ville du silence by Maurice Amaraggi

Production: NEMO Films | Country: France | Year: 2005 | Duration: 52'
Synopsis: Who remembers the extraordinary city of Salonique, a multicultural environment where, for more than a half millennium, an Hebrew majority lived in? The documentary shows us the charm of this city, whose history is based on his organised cancellation because of disagreeing with nationalist ideas...

Suite Egyptienne by Claude Grunspan

Production: Les films d'ici | Country: France | Year: 2005 | Duration: 48'
Synopsis: My father has been deported from Egypt in 1961. He always refused to tell me what he has gone trough in this country where he was born and where he stayed eight years in prison as  a communist. I decided to go there on his tracks…

Category "Art and Heritage of the Mediterranean"

Détour De Seta by Salvo Cuccia

Production: Regione Siciliana / Filmoteca Regionale Siciliana CRICD | Country: Italy | Year: 2004 | Duration: 57'
Synopsis: Détour de Seta is a portrait of an author made by another author, who proposes us a tour through the extraordinary work of Vittorio de Seta, the famous Italian director who signed several documental and fictional films…

Ertijal (Improvisation) by Raed Andoni

Production: Saed Andoni / Dar Films Productions | Country: Palestine | Year: 2005 | Duration:60'
Synopsis: Samir, Wissam and Adnan Joubran, three young Palestinian brothers, have different lifestyles, experiences, personalities and points of view but they share a common passion for playing “aoud instrument”…

Gelato an endless passion by Susan Gray

Production: Stefilm | Country: America | Year: 2005 | Duration: 52'
Synopsis: The making of ice cream is a craft and much more. It's an history which dates many centuries ago but it can only be definied by those who have dedicated their life to it. Through knowledge, experience or just passion, the characters of the film reveal us the world of Gelato…

Kristl by Danko Volaric

Production: HRT | Country: Croatia | Year: 2005 | Duration: 51'
Synopsis: Vlado Kristl is an artist whose activity as painter, film-maker and poet had deeply marked the Croatian and German artistic background  of the 20th century…

Miquel Bauçà: poeta invisibile by Agusti Villaronga

Production: Diagonal Televiso, Albert Sagalès | Country: Spain | Year: 2006 | Duration: 55'
Synopsis: This documentary on the life and work of the Majorcan poet Miquel Bauçà is structured as an unnerving dictionary of images, alphabetically disordered, as it moves from M to A or from A to M, from "Morir-se sol" (Dying alone) to "Mort" (Death). There are fragments of fiction, reports and  interviews, given in  a variety of visual effects : in sepia, in black and white and in colour…

Sacrées bouteilles by Fitouri Belhiba

Production: Fil Fil Films | Country: Tunisia | Year: 2005 | Duration: 26'
Synopsis: Mohsen lives in South Tunisia. He works at the post-office. In his free time (it's been ten years???? now !), he cleans 170 kms of beaches. So far, he has collected 58.000 bottles from every shore of the Mediterranean, swept in by the Sea…

Slimane Azem, une légende de l'exil by Rachid Merabet

Production: Antea, les films de la catsgne | Country: France | Year: 2005 | Duration: 52'
Synopsis: Slimane Azem is a famous representative of the Algerian song: his portrait is a submersion into the poetic universe of a thousand-year old culture, the  Berbers’ one. It's a trip through the work of this adulated artist…

Category "Investigative Reportage and Documentary"

Badal by Ibtisam Mara'na

Production: Osnat Trabelsi, Trabelsi Productions | Country: Israel | Year: 2005 | Duration: 52'
Synopsis: Umm Waji is a 67-years-old Palestinian woman, married, mother of ten children. A Badal is a wedding arrangement, where a brother and a sister of one family get married with a sister and a brother of another family, engaging the two couples forever…

Bonne à vendre by Dima Al Joundi

Production: Les films du soleil | Country: Lebanon | Year: 2006 | Duration: 52'
Synopsis: Lots of Sri Lanka women leave every year their country to go working as housekeepers to Middle East countries, in particular to Lebanon, a country of 4 million inhabitants which nowadays counts 800.000 foreign workers…

Gambit by Sabine Gisiger

Production: Dschoint Ventschr Filmproduktion | Country: Switzerland | Year: 2005 | Duration: 107'
Synopsis: In 1976, in the northern Italian town of Seveso, a dioxin explosion in the chemical factory Icmesa caused a terrible catastrophe for the  environment and the human beings.  Condemned to five years of jail in 1983, the chemist Jörg Sambeth remembers the terrible event…

La danse enfermée by Françis Fehr

Production: BFC Productions | Country: France | Year: 2006 | Duration: 52'
Synopsis: Some prisoners of Les Baumettes, the Marseilles' female prison, together with a guard and some dancers, prepare a spectacle directed by Philippe Talard. A show never seen before in a prison…

Mémoire de plomb by Valérie Gaget-Deslandes

Production: France 2, "Envoyé spécial" | Country: France | Year: 2005 | Duration: 33'
Synopsis: This report is a journey into Morocco's dark years. The Equity and Reconciliation Commission, sets up at the instigation of King Mohammed VI, considers witnesses of victims and relatives' victims of the repression between 1956 and 1999…

Tunisie, le sommet de l'intox by Christian Karcher

Production: TSR, Temps présent | Country: Switzerland | Year: 2005 | Duration: 33'
Synopsis: Is it possible to organize a World Summit about Information Society in a country where the media and Internet are censored? A team went to Tunis to film a democracy in which the observance of the law permits to cover all human rights abuse…

Category "Mediterranean Creativity – First Work"

Beekeeping after war by Tomas Leach

Production: FABRICA | Country: England | Year: 2006 | Duration: 52'
Synopsis: Between the Friuli and the Bulgar regions, an area of excellent beekeepers exists : even if the war shaked those territories and  people have suffered under the NATO sanctions, men and women are still passionately producing a tasty honey…

Castells by Gereon Wetzel

Production: Philipp Wunot Sphinx Media and HFF Munchen | Country: Germany | Year: 2006 | Duration: 88'
Synopsis: In Catalonia, an old and fascinating tradition is still living : Castells, the formation of human pyramids. These are made of 400 people and they can reach a 10-metres height. The different groups test their forces in faboulous competitions…

Istimaryya Controvento tra Napoli e Baghad by Michelangelo Severgnini

Production: Peacereporter | Country: Italy | Year: 2006 | Duration: 94'
Synopsis: Istimaryya is the travel diary of Shadi, a Syrian boy who decided to go to Iraq defending the people from the colonialist aggression. A travel made of doubts and paradoxes, meeting people and strong histories…

It's not a gun by Hélèna Cotinier & Pierre-Nicolas Durand

Production: IDEO Productions | Country: France | Year: 2006 | Duration: 67'
Synopsis: Ramzi Aburedwan, a Palestinian musician, created in 2002 an association called Al Kamandjati (the violonist) in order to open some music schools for defavorised Palestinian children, in particular for the ones living in refugiee champs and in the town of Cisjordania et Gaza…

L'arabe du coin by Kamal Redouani

Production: Sunset Production | Country: France | Year: 2005 | Duration: 52'
Synopsis: Opened from early morning until late on night, this man, affectively called Corner Arab, becomes an institution, as a public service.. an important presence, above all in France. This community comes in particular from Maghreb…

Quelques miettes pour les oiseaux by Nassim Amaouche

Production: Eris Production | Country: France | Year: 2005 | Duration: 28'30
Synopsis: Ruwayshed is the last village in Jordan before the Iraqi border. It’s no man’s land. This short documentary gives an insight into the lives of a few people who live there: the owner of a small bar and hotel, a few girls who work as ‘hostesses’, and a man selling jerry cans of petrol at the roadside. When the police arrive, men and women scatter like a bunch of shooed away birds…