Isabelle Tollenaere

California City, a planned city in the desert, where a young African-American man dreams of starting a new life. Documentary impressions, mobile phone videos, diary entries and Google Maps views are combined into a portrait of this otherworldly place.

Three men—from China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Palestine—live together in a squatted apartment in a seemingly abandoned building in Paris. The group is bound together by their shared experience of life in exile and the fleeting nature of their possessions, relationships, and sense of home, but the temporary safe space is threatened by outside forces and events.

A young woman overhears a heated argument between a man and a woman, in a language she does not understand. As she continues her walk, she is left with questions she cannot answer.

How do Europeans deal with their recent dark history (the wars, dictatorships and occupations)? What traces are etched?

Young soldiers are roaming the forest aimlessly, shots are heard in the distance. But something isn’t quite right. Soviet troops, the Wehrmacht and American soldiers in Iraq seem to be co-existing in the same peaceful woods. They speak awkwardly about war memories that could never have been their own. And yet they know them by heart. A lighthearted film connecting imagination and storytelling to the reality of war.

In The Fruit Tree a young woman, Sharleece, wanders through a house that is available to rent in the sleepy desert town where she lives, California City. Looking out of the window evokes unexpected memories of her childhood home in Los Angeles.