Carnets du sous-sol

Voyages au centre de la Terre : Dans les pas de Jules Verne

In the chaotic aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein, Fakhir, a father of eight, is serving in the Iraqi army. All around him, he sees innocent civilians getting injured by landmines, so he determines to disarm them with his own hands, using just a pocketknife and some wire cutters. He clears thousands of roadside bombs, mines and car bombs, knowing that every time he cuts a wire it could cost him his life—which he seems to find less important than the lives of others. In 2014, by this time having lost a leg, he starts working for the Kurdish Peshmerga, disarming boobytraps left behind by Daesh in and around Mosul. An enthusiastic home video maker, Fakhir collects hundreds of hours of footage of his day-to-day work.

L'Épopée des gueules noires

Henri Storck’s militant short on Depression-era Belgium, set in Walloon slums on the outskirts of a prosperous city. Staged vignettes expose substandard housing, overcrowding, and numbed survival through claustrophobic, frame-filling images; a coda on slum clearance and “garden city” rehousing offers guarded hope.

In 1962 Joris Ivens was invited to Chile for teaching and filmmaking. Together with students he made …A Valparaíso, one of his most poetic films. Contrasting the prestigious history of the seaport with the present the film sketches a portrait of the city, built on 42 hills, with its wealth and poverty, its daily life on the streets, the stairs, the rack railways and in the bars. Although the port has lost its importance, the rich past is still present in the impoverished city. The film echoes this ambiguous situation in its dialectical poetic style, interweaving the daily life reality (of 1963) with the history of the city and changing from black and white to colour, finally leaving us with hopeful perspective for the children who are playing on the stairs and hills of this beautiful town.

A cinematic and introspective look at the residents of a Quebec town—once the site of the world's largest asbestos mine—as they grapple with their community's industrial past. Striving to honour their heritage while reconciling with their history and forging a new path forward, the miners delve into the intricacies of progress and healing.

10 May 1943. Something is spotted drifting ashore off the coast of Northwest Donegal, Ireland. Something that would change the lives of the local people forever.

Rebellious City is a documentary about the Provo movement and the city of Amsterdam in the sixties.

OUT OF DARKNESS: THE MINE WORKERS' STORY is a documentary by Academy Award-winning director Barbara Kopple (HARLAN COUNTY, USA). Historical film footage and photographs are integrated with first-hand accounts of UMWA history and of the Pittston strike of 1989-90.

In this docudrama, the real star is a railroad tunnel. First built, at the instigation of a banker and an engineer, in 1872 under appalling conditions, it was widened to accommodate automobiles in 1972. The tunnel links the Rhineland in Germany with Italy and goes through the Swiss mountains. The many lives lost in the building of the first tunnel were considered to be one of the costs for economic progress. In one re-enactment, a strike for better conditions is severely dealt with by the military. Even in 1972, though working conditions were better, most of the men working on the tunnel were poor immigrant workers, with almost no power to negotiate better treatment.

Western Sahara is one of the most heavily mined territories in the world following decades of conflict with its neighbours. Despite a 1991 ceasefire, most Sahrawis still linger in refugee camps in Algeria because it is too dangerous to live there. Now, some brave young women have taken it upon themselves to clear their ancestral lands of landmines so their people can return.

I had heard of a Chilean painter, author of a thousand paintings, who had disappeared long ago. I had been given an address on the banks of the Loire, at number 640 of a road that no longer existed. No one had been here for decades. Everything had remained there, as if someone had fled.

Anna Osborn and Sonia Rockhouse were forever changed when the Pike River Mine Disaster stole their loved ones, but instead of sitting down, they stood up! But They Did tells Anna and Sonia's story, following them through the period of time before and during the re-entry of the mine.

Western Sahara is a conflict region located in North West Africa. After a bloody war in the region, the land is littered with landmines and war ruminants and explosives. There are about 7 to 10 million landmines still buried there, especially in the area close to the wall built by Morocco and which separates Western Sahara into two. Landmines in the area have a huge impact on life in general; human casualties, cattle and irreversible environmental catastrophes.

Mines antipersonnel : La guerre des lâches

Mirage of El Dorado leads us into the mountains of northern Chile, where the devastating operations of Canadian mining companies threaten a fragile ecosystem in one of the driest parts of the globe. This « political cowboy flick» follows the pitched battle between a farming community in the Huasco valley and Canada’s mining giant Barrick Gold with its sidekick Noranda (now part of the Suisse corporation Xstrata). It’s a battle fought high in the Andes cordillera where farmers and local representatives fear the ravages of open pit mining operations in a place where a fragile system of glaciers feeds the rivers that flow into the farmlands built out of the advancing Atacama desert.

Documentary that denounces the damages caused by the use of land mines in Western Sahara and shows the lives of those affected.

Silence always surrounds the mine, first when it explodes and then when it eternally haunts its victims. The history of the silence of this fire hidden by Morocco in the sand of Western Sahara has left more than 4,000 victims in what is considered the largest minefield in the world. Daha and Fatimetu suffered the effect of the silence of the mines, their lives changed forever, like that of the Saharawi people who, after 14 years cleaning the desert of artifacts, the rupture of the ceasefire have left the future of the contamination of their territory.

A boy has a dream of traveling to the world, especially to Paris where his uncle lives, but a wall built on his land divides his country and does not allow him to travel or cross to the other side of his land.

Republic of Finland is promoting clean technology by organizing Green Mining seminars where foreign experts tell us how the development of the world is becoming increasingly expensive by 2050. The Earth is running out of resources and mining companies have to use increasingly low-grade metal deposits. Finland aims to be a model country for environmentally friendly mining. Its pioneer project is Talvivaara, which uses new biotechnology to extract nickel, zinc and uranium. Through several charismatic characters, the documentary film The Land Of Mine follows the rise of the biggest nickel mine in Western Europe and the ensuing disasters whose effects continue to reverberate in the nation.