Cinéma du Réel

Tous les jeudis un groupe d'étudiants de l'université d'Ibadan, la plus ancienne du Nigeria, organise un ciné-club, transformant un petit amphithéâtre en une agora politique où s'affine le regard et s'élabore une parole critique.

Sidi, a Mauritanian worker, labors in France. Like most immigrant workers, he is assigned the hardest and most dangerous jobs. Sidi and his fellow workers are systematically and continuously exploited—both by their employers and by their own compatriots, who constantly offer forged work permits and slums where immigrants pay exorbitant prices just for the right to sleep. But faced with racism and economic exploitation, immigrant workers come together, organize…

A farewell letter, a furious lamentation to a mother, a land, a hero, a victim, a martyr. This is a symbolic social-political voyage of a society spiralling between religion, identity and collective memory.

Nestor, Aaron, Benjamin and Rafiki are economics undergraduates at the University of Bangui. Navigating between the overcrowded classrooms, the petty trades that allow students to survive, bribery lurking everywhere, Rafiki shows us what students lives are like in the Central African Republic, a shattered society where the youth keeps dreaming for a brighter future for their country.

In Makongo, the Central African director Elvis Sabin Ngaibino tells the story of Albert and André, two young Aka Pygmies from Mongoumba. Ridiculed at school, they respond by working to combat illiteracy in their community. To tackle the problem of exclusion, they try to set up a mobile school, funding their efforts by selling makongo - an edible caterpillar much prized by Central Africans - on the market rather than asking the authorities or NGOs for help. As they plunge into the bush and the forest in search of the caterpillars, Albert and André talk about their culinary traditions and commerce in Bangui.