Genre: Documentary

In the early 1960s in Lebanon, Manoug Manougian, a professor of mathematics at Haigazian University and his students designed and launched rockets for the study and exploration of space. A short while later, the students joined researchers mobilized by the Lebanese space program but the program fell under the control of the Lebanese army. The Lebanese Rocket Society was born. With financing from the state, the design of rockets improved and were tested. Despite its success, the Lebanese Rocket Society stopped operating suddenly in 1967, the ambitious scientific project vanished from collective memory. The film relates the astonishing story of the The Lebanese Rocket Society in the first chapter, and in the second chapter, the film follows the filmmakers as they try to reconstruct one of the rockets, as a sculpture.

 “Omar is dead!”, a voice cried out in Dakar, on the 11th of May in 1973. A young militant philosopher, and the articulate Maoist in Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) had allegedly committed suicide in his Gorée Island prison cell. His family and friends did not believe a word of it, demanding that light be shed on this political crime.  Just a Movement is a free reprise of La Chinoise, that reallocates its characters fifty years later in Dakar, and updates its plot, offering a m editation on the relationship between politics, justice, and memory. Omar Blondin Diop, becomes the key character. Through this cinematographic gesture that oscillates and circulates between documentary and filmed essay, Vincent Meessen questions the Senegal of yesterday and today, and the not-so-subtle neo-imperialism of a China that uses the soft powers of education and culture to penetrate the present and future of Senegal.

In 1968 a wave of student protests broke out across the world , drawing inspiration and breath from the Civil Rights movement and the student movement against the Vietnam War. Everywhere in the world, youth rose to reject the social, political, and cultural premises of the world recreated after the Second World War. They aspired for a new society achieved through an endemic and protean protest, carried by a new generation critical of the established way of life…a way of life deemed as colonial and authoritarian, fixed and hierarchical, liberticidal, and moralizing. Between nostalgia and overly ideological attacks, how do we look at this global movement 50 years later? What is this bygone era’s legacy? The recent uprisings that invaded the streets of big cities (Paris, London, Rome, Dakar, San Francisco, Beirut, etc.) are countless, so much so that the little Parisian May of 1968 seems almost anecdotal. It is a moment of global change that this film proposes to revisit. Imbued with the fever of the decade, it tells the story of the mad rush of euphoria and violence when everything seemed possible but whose legacy still divides people.

Lake Managua holds tremendous significance for Nicaraguans, it is the polluted and stagnant lake where the ashes of the revolutionary, Augusto Sandino, were thrown after his assassination. Nicaragua remains in a state of of unresolved suspension, the war in Nicaragua ended with negotiations for which opposing factions never provided a public explanation. Narrated in the first person, the film blends archival footage with dazzling landscape captures. Filmmaker Mercedes Moncada focuses on her personal narrative of the brutality of the Somoza dictatorship that followed the Sandinista revolution in 1979 and the corruption of Sandinista leaders who eventually betrayed the revolution. In Magic Words, Lake Managua appears like a metaphor for the rotten legacy of corrupt regimes that have marked the modern history of Nicaragua.

The Immortal tells the story of the Rivera family,  torn apart by war in Nicaragua. Trapped in the crossfire between the Sandinistas and the Contras, the Contras seized the father, two teenage sons and the teenage daughter. The mother managed to escape with the youngest son before the Contras burned their house. The family was separated until the end of the conflict. Their reunion confronted  the open wounds of the war, and all that continues to tear apart the fabric of Nicaraguan society.

After years of swimming every day in the freezing ocean at the tip of Africa, Craig Foster meets…