Facing Darkness

"I'm gay, I'm a fag, I'm proud and I really love sex."

The life of Michèle Firk — a trailblazing French journalist, film critic, aspiring director and communist activist involved in various liberation struggles in the second half of the 20th century — as told by narrator Alice Diop, modern day French director.

An aquatic ballet to the sound of It's Raining Men.

In 1914, the Czech architect Jan Letzel designed in the Japanese city of Hiroshima Center for the World Expo, which has turned into ruins after the atomic bombing in August 1945. “Atomic Dome” – all that remains of the destroyed palace of the exhibition – has become part of the Hiroshima memorial. In 2007, French sculptor, painter and film director Jean-Gabriel Périot assembled this cinematic collage from hundreds of multi-format, color and black and white photographs of different years’ of “Genbaku Dome”.

At the end of the 1960s the post-war generation began to revolt against their parents. This was a generation disillusioned by anti-communist capitalism and a state apparatus in which they believed they saw fascist tendencies. This generation included journalist Ulrike Meinhof, lawyer Horst Mahler, filmmaker Holger Meins as well as students Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader.

Medically speaking, we're moving forward.

French archive images of the Second World War pass in a dizzying tempo. The pace slows when we see images of the liberation. We see happy, liberated citizens, but slowly a cruel scene becomes visible. Women who are alleged to have had a relationship with the Germans are publicly insulted, shaved and beaten.

Whaling has been around for centuries. It seems to be the fruit of man’s violence, destroying himself by destroying nature. Accompanying the rise of capitalism, the practice survives today, reflecting humans’ eternal destructiveness of nature and the creatures unable to resist them.

On the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Akihiro, a native Japanese filmmaker living in Paris, travels to Japan to interview survivors for a documentary commemorating the victims of the attack. Deeply moved by the interviews, he decides to take a break to wander through the city during which he meets Michiko, a merry, enigmatic young woman. Michiko takes him for a joyful and improvised journey from the city towards the sea where the horrors of the past are mingled with the simplicity of the present.

Documentary short about the Black Panther movement.

A beautiful, elegiac cycle expressing the boundless hope and infinite nostalgia of the voyage, consisting entirely of still images and painstakingly assembled into a emotionally moving pictorial essay. Periot: 'Remember that I am the cause of your journey. Don't lose me along the way.'

An intimate and political history of the French working class from the early 1950s to the present day.

Revolution, queer and rock n roll.

A very private moment in which the body becomes an artificial and fabricated entity. A young man changes in front of a mirror. He cleans the scars on his stomach, takes out his contact lenses, removes his dentures and brushes his teeth before leaving. This brings up the question of appearances: here we see what we are not in the habit of seeing. There is also the question of intimacy.... A question, however, that remains unanswered.

Jean-Gabriel Périot sketches the portrait of a group of women for whom music is a means of resistance and of escaping isolation.