La danse du singe et du poisson

In 2009 the body of Alice B is found washed up on an African beach. Next to the corpse of the white, 30-year old European woman lie those of a dozen black migrants. Eight years after this tragedy, Pierre-Alain Meier travels to Senegal in the hope of understanding the story behind this shipwreck. When he was Alice’s age, he wandered the streets of Dakar planning the production of the film Hyenas. Like her, he was a white person in Africa. Perhaps like her, he would hoped he could blend in a bit more with his African friends and co-workers and not be so unmistakeably foreign. Following in Alice’s footsteps, the filmmaker today puts his own story into perspective, with humility and affection, allowing us access to a very intimate terrain. Farewell to Africa tells the story of a final journey and sets out to explore the complex ties – both rich and asymmetrical – that have never ceased to exist between Europe and French-speaking Africa. (Luciano Barisone)

Vincent Fleury, a taxi driver who has been rejected by his wife, embarks on an adventure from which he hopes to benefit: in exchange for a sum of money which will enable him to pay child support for his son, he agrees to set out for Crete with an unknown person, Thelma, to help her find the ex-lover who had spurned her. During their trip across Switzerland, Italy and Greece, they flirt – but at the last minute Thelma always holds back. Vincent is at a loss to understand until he discovers that she is a trans woman who, in order to keep him with her has been lying from the very beginning. Torn between love and repulsion, Vincent has to make a choice.

Samnang faces the demolition of his lifelong home in Phnom Penh coupled with pressures from family, friends, and neighbours, which all arise and intersect at this moment of sudden change.

Indochina 1931, the Siam Golf. A small family strives against destitution. The mother realizes that the departure of her two grown children - Joseph 20 and Suzanne 16 - is ineluctable. Deceived by the colonial administration, she invested all of her savings in worthless, regularly flooded farmland. Driven to fight against the corrupted bureaucrats who conned her, she puts into place a crazy scheme: building a dam against the sea with the help of the villagers...

Binchey, a traditional peasant farmer from Mondulkiri, was expelled from his land – like hundreds of thousands of farmers in Cambodia. He feels powerless in the face of foreign rubber tree plantations spreading across more and more parts of the country. Together with Binchey and other villagers, film director Mehdi Sahebi stages the story of this confiscation of the land and its ramifications.

A nocturnal drive along a rural highway into a city at dawn that is somehow moving in the wrong direction. It is only after a while that you notice that the vehicles are travelling backwards, receding back into the dusk of reality. This mysterious metaphor forms the starting point for a journey into the unknown history of Cambodian film. Nearly 400 films were made in Phnom Penh between 1960 and 1975, only 30 of which survive today. The Khmer Rouge burnt them or allowed them to decay along with many of the country’s studios and cinemas. Most of those involved in the film industry became victims of the genocide. Director Davy Chou, the grandson of one of the most important film producers of the Golden Age’ of Cambodian cinema, uses his film to reconstruct the country’s cinematographic legacy. He goes about his work like an archaeologist, recognising how impossi- ble it is to actually speak to survivors about a life’s work destroyed but not forgotten. LE SOMMEIL D’OR undertakes a painstaking search for fragments of memory in the present, whether in the form of lobby cards, songs on YouTube or a visit to a karaoke bar housed in what used to be a film studio, and gradually coalesces into a strikingly vibrant memorial.