Sébastien Descoins

Dry grass, scorched earth, this is the end of summer. In La Valentine, a neighborhood in the north of Marseille, Bobby and Melo strive to exist through stories they're telling to themselves.

The exemplary adventure of Somankidi Coura, an agricultural cooperative founded in Mali in 1977 by West African immigrant workers living in workers' accommodation in France, sheds light on the violence of colonial agriculture and the ecological challenges in Africa today.

It’s firstly the portrait of an area, France’s north coast between Dunkirk and Calais, where Olivier Derousseau lives and works: ransacked landscapes, port installations, plumes of smoke from the chimneys of petrochemical facilities, blown by the wind… It’s also a musical suite in five parts, a kind of minimalist blues lovingly composed in memory of time and people that have disappeared: the constant bass of juggernauts on the motorway, the percussion of the wind in the microphones, all the world’s sounds blending into a repetitive guitar thread. And it’s a melancholy meditation on the stuff of days, the flesh of the future, on irretrievable erasure and the traces waiting and hoping to be saved.

In Algiers, in June 1957, Maurice Audin, a 25-year-old mathematician, was arrested by French paratroopers. His wife, Josette, and their three children never saw him again. This documentary interweaves testimonies from French and Algerian protagonists: activists for Algerian independence, lawyers, historians, and military personnel. Drawing on the research of historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, it blends archival footage, newspaper articles, books, drawings, and reenactments to reconstruct the context of this disappearance and denounce the torture and murder practiced in Algeria. Josette Audin is the central figure and the moral compass of this film.

"The caterpillar becomes a butterfly, the pig becomes a sausage, that is the law of nature." From birth to supermarket, 3 experiments on the well-being of farmed pigs are discussed by 2 biologists, 1 philosopher, 1 animal keeper, and 2 trainees from the pig research station of the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique in Saint-Gilles in Brittany. Between scientific documentary and journalistic tract, this is a subjective vision of the practices of scientific objectivation in a French institution.

Two septuagenarians return to a small town in the Dordogne. Every step they take brings them closer to the event that changed their lives sixty years earlier.

There is no denying that autobiographical intentions and introspection have their pitfalls. But a man's voice off screen sets the tone from the start: "There is no such thing as a private diary. The very expression is nonsensical." No chance then to see outpourings, confessions or explanations.

From what was to me a gift of friendship day: a book makes some of Rosa Luxemburg's prison letters written by her friends Sonia Liebknecht and Mathilde Wurm between July 1916 and October 1918. And all the jingles who composed this period: songs of birds, plants, colors and sounds passages. Those for events in the events of the being-locked. As for the outside: October, World War Revolution, The emigrant and Chaplin The Adventurer, The affliction flowers and Klee's zoological garden. Appearances / disappearances, present stories, their intertwined. Destinies.

At the outskirts of Paris, in a rapidly-changing suburb, a group of Romanian families are searching for a place to live. From their abandoned village, to the demolished slum and occupied houses, their quest weaves together a common history, forged through solidarity and marked by displacement. Accompanying them on their journey, we build this film as an alternative habitable space.

A transferred prefect, a fiery driver, an overturned car, an exploded radar, three faded yellow vests, a loaded gun, an improvised prison, an overcharged call, a shot plum... In short, a French roundabout.

Saint-Nazaire, the shipyards. Tiny little men on gigantic machines, boats that will sail away: between the workers' every day life, the sailors' experience and the dream of seeing the world, how can imagination still have a place in an industrial world?

Just one of the many far-reaching impacts of the slave trade on human history is on agriculture and horticulture. While the French plantation owners on the Caribbean island of Martinique had their gardens laid out, Versailles-style, their enslaved workers continued their tradition of using medicinal wild herbs. Nowadays these herbs represent one of several resources through which the people of Martinique counter the health and ecological ravage caused by the use of pesticides on the banana plantations. Farmers are reclaiming uncultivated lands to grow indigenous vegetables, without any industrial pesticides; they fight boldly for simple biodiversity.

Overlapping portraits of migrants and the places where their journeys sometimes come to an abrupt halt-in Europe's buffer zones in Greece and Turkey, which prove to be real "non-places".

‘Devki’ is the owner of “Bhagwati Glass Enterprises”, a glass tube factory in Firozabad that he created in the year 1973. François Daireaux, spent days in Devki’s office for days filming these images displayed on the control screen along with recording some off-screen conversations. Behind closed doors, stories unfolded, intersected,and often tales were embroidered, while in the production spaces the workers rested, waited, breathed, and played, in close proximity to the incandescent glass stream that passed by.

To lift the spirits of her friend Mélanie, Lou brings her on a camping trip to a lone fortress on the sea. As Lou hides her little romantic secrets, Mélanie lingers in her ruminations. One morning, a solitary and enigmatic figure appears and draws Melanie into a fantastical encounter.

One hundred and twenty-five hectares represents the amount of land occupied illicitly since 1983 by a collective of small farmers in Le Morne-Rouge in northern Martinique. As she harvests taro corms in her field, founding member Véronique Monjean retraces the collective’s history and their occupation of the land. In taking possession of what was, at the time, unoccupied property, the collective was seeking, above all, to counter the expansion of real-estate development, which threatened to reduce the area of arable land on the island. The collective favours subsistence agriculture and biodiversity through the rotation of local crops (tubers, root vegetables, etc.), which have the potential to provide for the island’s population in the event of a crisis or natural disaster.

The Yamuna is the most sacred river in India and for twenty years the most polluted in the country. All the sewers of New Delhi flow into it, creating an immense ecological disaster. Yet thousands of the country's poorest Indians live freely around it. Their names are Augustin, Tulsiram, Kishori, Hari… They were able to invent their own models of adaptation with faith and determination. While the Indian state has always neglected its banks, they are today coveted by numerous real estate developers aided by corrupt politicians. In this new context, the inhabitants of Yamuna must perpetuate their belief while amplifying their spirit of resistance to continue living on their land.

A storm breaks out in a high mountain village. Thirty-year-old Maude then discovers a mysterious bird, which will inevitably lead her to a witch's abode.

A behind-the-scenes look at Rue89’s quest to reinvent journalism in the digital era.