BelgianDocs

4 years ago, the directors were about to fly to California from Zaventem for a shooting when suddenly their world collapsed: the Zaventem airport was the target of suicide bombers. Filming the testimonies of others on their coping with the trauma and the handicap, they overcome their own fears.

Can one imagine intimacy with a person responsible for millions of deaths, of Nazism, the worst criminal plot in history: Rudolph Hess, alleged original author of Mein Kampf – the Director’s Grandfather did. Hess' protestant pastor during his last ten years of imprisonment in Spandau, he was his only confident. How to deal with those which Hanna Arendt prevented from being considered as monsters: getting to Hess' humanity was Charles' mission.

Aged from 20 to 65, our "cleaning ladies" work on call through a voucher system. They used to work undeclared, or in factories, were salespeople, educators, or caregivers ... This choral film draws the outline condition of these brave, luminous women who accepted to share their gesture's choreography and overcoming their hardship and the lack of consideration from their employers.

Set in the gray period before the Nuremberg trial, Ashcan unveils the story of the secret prison where US Army authority detained main Nazi leaders, in Luxembourg: Goering, Doenitz, Keitel, Rosenberg, Ley, Frank, Streicher, Seyss-Inquart, Lutz von Krosigk, von Papen ... The allies needed to figure out the Nazi regime functionning. 

Dour Music Festival is among the largest European music events, gathering of 50 000 people, and miroring contemporary society’s evolution. The team follows the festival's organizers, the programmers in their quest for unique talents, the Police, Red Cross, Firemen and various security services during festival preparation of this major event,  an authentic youth rite of passage to adulthood.

The director returns to Greece, which she left at the sudden death, while shooting his last film, of Theo Angelopoulos - she was his assistant. A country facing social violence, a general impoverishment and the collapse of a whole system of values. The film, in the form of a letter, however alternates fragments of utopia and hope with carefully chosen films excerpts of the greek director.

Emmanuel Botalatala, the Minister of Garbage of Kinshasa, enters the last portion of his life. Having sacrificed everything for his art, turning trash into beauty, he stubbornly carries on with his work and secure his legacy for future generations, promoting a culture center in the slums, and passing on his skills to his apprentice.

In a permaculture schooling farm and within a beehive-like bunch, we meet those who have engaged in a new philosophy of providing food and taste, and initiate in listening to nature and act on the future. Confronting industrial farming with its excesses, permaculture replaces annual crops and seeds with  a perenial  agriculture, nurishing the earth as much as using it.

From the uzbek farm worker in the  cotton fields to the Indian dyer, through an activist for workers' rights in Indonesia to the belgian store where the director grew up, panties come to life. Its manufacturing process symbolizes the raw mechanisms of globalization. What value is given to the clothes and especially to the lives of those who make them?