A Filmmaker’s Notebook in the Occupied Territories

Following the appeal of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, founding member of the International Parliament of Writers besieged in Ramallah, a delegation of writers went there to demonstrate alongside the Palestinians a "beautiful linguistic collaboration" in these "high places of spirituality” (Ramallah in Arabic) where the Israeli program of humiliation is also a “verbicidal war”. “We want to listen and make other voices heard in the din of war, that of writers, artists, academics, all those who are preparing for the future... Opposing the logic of war, not a force of "interposition but INTERPRETATION FORCES", says the French writer Christian Salmon, member of this international delegation.

Veteran French doc director Dominique Dubosc revisits the South American country where he taught ethnology, made his first films and got a taste of life under a military dictatorship.

The first film in Jean Rouch's filmography is not his first film at all. It was edited by a French news company, using images he had shot but organised into a very different sequence from his own. On top of that, it was accompanied by a colonialist commentary said by a sports reporter! As we watch, Jean Rouch ad-libs a new commentary more in keeping with his images, and so, in 1991, he finally finishes his first film! - Dominique Dubosc

A day in the life of a Franciscan peasant family in Paraguay in 1968, depicting the Cabral family's gestures, attitudes, small daily events, affective relationships, and dignity.

From January 16 to February 28, 1991, I experienced the Gulf War like an endless nightmare. I only left it when I arrived in New York where I was to meet the poet and filmmaker Jonas Mekas. Instead of making a film about Mekas, I only celebrated this newfound life, as if it were the only response I could make to the war.

MANOJHARA portrays – in their own words – the experiences of the residents of Paraguay’s Santa Isabel leper colony. They narrate images of life in the colony with statements about moving from the periphery of the colony, where the healthier patients stay, to the center, where the dying patients are, as well as anticipation of a celebration and not wanting to feel ill and outcast.

The film assembles a series of chapters which move between impressionistic studies of unusual spaces and structures observed in the occupied Palestinian territories.

This film, commissioned by the Penarroya workers on the eve of their strike in February 1972, presents their demands against the powerful LE NICKEL-PENARROYA-MOKTA trust, which constitutes the majority of the industrial activities of the Rothschild group.

In a mimetic approach to that of the great documentarian, Dubosc delivers notes and fragments of their meetings between 1991 and 1992 in New York. In his apartment, Mekas lends himself, with poetry, to the game of the filmer-filmed. Numerous excerpts from his films are inserted into the montage.