The Desert Ark

In 1980s Bacolod City, a young man aspires to continue the family legacy by winning an inter-city pastry competition with the help of his feuding grandfather and grandmother.

In Algiers in 1993, while the civil war is starting, Mrs Osmane's tenants have to endure her bad temper. Her husband left her and the fear to lose her respectability haunt her. The former member of the Resistance during the Independence War persists in controlling the slightest moves of the households rather than struggle against her own frustrations. Learning her daughter is in love, the possibility of finding herself alone will push her to the limit: The symbolical Mrs Osmane "harem" is about to collapse.

An American-born Jewish adolescent, Hannah Stern, is uninterested in the culture, faith and customs of her relatives. However, she begins to revaluate her heritage when she has a supernatural experience that transports her back to a Nazi death camp in 1941. There she meets a young girl named Rivkah, a fellow captive in the camp. As Rivkah and Hannah struggle to survive in the face of daily atrocities, they form an unbreakable bond.

“Poussières de Juillet”, produced in 1967 by Hachemi El-Chérif, is taken from a poem by Kateb Yacine. "We made a film on the return of the ashes of Emir Abdelkader, to Algeria. It was the opportunity to make a film on the ancestors with M'hamed Issiakhem. He designed glass plates on the basis of my texts. Then we had actors collaborate. It was a film which cost us a total of 300 dinars, proof that we could do work for television without too much money. We won two first international prizes at the Belgrade festival. We left the original of the film with the Egyptians in Alexandria and they lost it. We kept a copy but over time I wonder what happened to it, because there is no not even had a screening, they say it still exists, but I don't know in what state." Kateb Yacine, July 28, 1986, interview with Arlette Casas.

A cargo aircraft crashes in a sandstorm in the Sahara with less than a dozen men on board. One of the passengers is an airplane designer who comes up with the idea of ripping off the undamaged wing and using it as the basis for a replacement aircraft they need to build before their food and water run out.

For generations, two rival French villages, Longueverne and Velrans, have been at war. But this is no ordinary conflict, for the on-going hostilities are between two armies of young schoolboys. When he is beaten by his father for having lost his buttons, the leader of the Longueverne army, Lebrac, has an idea which will give his side the advantage: next time, he and his brave soldiers will go in battle without their clothes...

In the hills of Costa Rica, Doña Carmen struggles to pass on her tribe's traditional ways of life. She must soon marry off her only granddaughter, and 70-year-old shaman Don Claudio lays his claim to the girl, who is only 12 and already impregnated by him. When the girl befriends the young son of a visiting anthropologist, it forces a collision between the modern world and the ancient one.

"Yasmina" filmed in 1961 in the middle of the Algerian war tells the story of a little Algerian girl with her hen and her family whose father was killed in a bombing by the French colonial army of occupation. The family, after a long journey, heads towards the refugee camps on the Tunisian border. Produced by the Cinema Service of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA) in the midst of the war of independence, these films were intended to re-inform the population and international public opinion on the abuses committed by the French colonial army: torture, arrests and arbitrary executions, napalm bombings, fires in douars, entire villages wiped off the map, etc. which the French media described as a "pacification" campaign. The latter censoring or reorienting any images that could harm the colonial narrative.

An ensemble piece set in a North African neighbourhood in Toulon.

In 1971 Salford fish-and-chip shop owner George Khan expects his family to follow his strict Pakistani Muslim ways. But his children, with an English mother and having been born and brought up in Britain, increasingly see themselves as British and start to reject their father's rules on dress, food, religion, and living in general.

At the end of an extraordinary situation in the village, when the people of the village cannot reach the government, they try to break a curse by organizing various rituals under the leadership of the Mukhtar and Kadir. After a while, the government official who comes to the village will confront the villagers with another reality in an authoritarian manner.

Même les anges ont le coeur brûlé

In a small village, young Mert is about to get traditionally circumcised, but the family does not have the money to follow up with the circumcision celebration. The family wants to be able to serve lamb meat to the guests at the celebration. Mert’s older sister scares him that if they cannot afford a lamb the father will slaughter him instead.

At a prestigious all-male university, three friends seek love outside of the school grounds; at the same time, a newly-hired music teacher seeks to befriend and loosen up the militantly strict headmaster.

Kesse is a third generation fisherman, living in a small coastal town in Northern Jutland. Life trudges along without surprises, but all this is about to change. The fishing industry is hit by financial crisis and the small fishing boats are swiftly put out of competition by big corporations. In desperation, Kesse tries to find a way out of his hopeless plight and has to resort to dishonest means, on top of having to fire his best friend and lone employee. As if this wasn't enough, he gets an unwelcome guest on-board in the form of marine biologist Gerd from Copenhagen, sent to study the fishing. Søren Balle's debut feature is a funny and touching film about love, friendship and the difficult art of dealing with change.

In 1960, nine-year-old Bachir dreamed of becoming the son of a martyr because he had heard that the children of martyrs would obtain everything after independence. He sets up a whole plan to get rid of a certain François, enemy of his country, while his father, Saddek, abandoned him with his mother and brothers. Through this fiction, the film looks at the life and visions of little Algerians during the War of National Liberation. Karim Traïdia looks back on his own childhood during the Algerian war (1945-1962). On a humorous note, it tells the adventures of a young child and his innocent friends against the backdrop of a raging merciless war.

On November 1, 1954, near Ghassira, a small village lost in the Aurès, a couple of French teachers and an Algerian boss were the first civilian victims of a seven-year war which would lead to the independence of Algeria. More than fifty years later, Malek Bensmaïl returns to this Chaoui village, which has become “the cradle of the Algerian revolution”, to film, throughout the seasons, its inhabitants, its school and its children.

Seasoned adventurer and treasure hunter Dirk Pitt, a former Navy SEAL, sets out for the African desert with his wisecracking buddy Al in search of a confederate ironclad battleship rumored to have vanished long ago, the main draw being the treasure supposedly hidden within the lost vessel. When the daring duo come across Dr. Eva Rojas, a beautiful scientist who is juggling an escape from a warlord and a mission to stop the spread of a powerful plague, their desert expedition begins to heat up.

Natsume Mochizuki works as a teen model in Tokyo, but she learns that she has to move to her father's hometown of Ukigumo. She is in a desperate situation because she can't do the things she wants to do in Ukigumo. One day, she meets Koichiro Hasegawa. He is the successor of the Hasegawa family. His family is wealthy and is respected in the area. Natsume Mochizuki and Koichiro Hasegawa become attracted to each other, but something changes their fate.

Headstrong girl Kenza lives with her father Ouira and grandfather Weljo on a car wrecking yard in the countryside of Curaçao. The two men are opposites that don't particularly attract: Ouira is a determined and rational police officer, while Weljo identifies with the original inhabitants and spirituality of the island. As Weljo wishes to prepare his passing to the world of spirits, the relationship between Ouira en Weljo starts to escalate and the eleven-year-old Kenza searches for her own path in-between the two extremes. The down-to-earth and avoidant mentality of Ouira no longer offers her all that she needs and slowly she opens up to the more mystical and comforting traditions of her grandfather.