It was during a visit to the church in her grandmother’s native village in Cinquera, El Salvador that Tatiana Huezo was inspired to make this film about the legacy of the civil war that tore the country apart from 1979 to 1991. The call to war had been launched from Cinquera. Pieces of a combat helicopter and portraits of young villagers who were killed decorate the church,  acting as  emblems of this violent history… Huezo filmed the village, the survivors, surrounding mountains, forests, and caves, and collected their memories of enduring, witnessing, and surviving in this marvelously edited film.

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.

 “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 his feature-length debut, Ephraim Asili drew inspiration from his own life experience as a member of the radical Black group MOVE to direct an impressive ensemble piece almost entirely set in a house in West Philadelphia. Described alternately as a “speculative re-enactment”, or as an experimental hybrid genre, that blends scripted drama with archive news footage, voice-overs, and interviews, The Inheritance could not be a timelier work to reflect with intelligence and heart on building radical grass-roots political movements. MOVE was the victim of a notorious and tragic police bombing in 1985.