L'Hypothèse du Mokélé M'Bembé

After a 20-year long fruitless search in the Cameroonian forest, Frenchman Michel Ballot is on the verge of giving up his lifelong quest to find the mysterious creature known as the Mokélé-Mbembé. Turning to local initiates for help, and torn between ancestral wisdom and scientific evidence, he embarks on a final journey into powers, knowledge and the unseen.

The implantation of African traders in Guangzhou is a recent phenomenon, on which Marie Voignier reports through her interlinking portraits of Jackie, Julie, Shanny who have come to set up their business on site. Amidst the monstrous accumulation of merchandise on the endless markets of the megacity, the film follows these African businesswomen grappling with the globalised Chinese economy.

How does a dictatorship exhibit itself to the tourists visiting it? What kind of narration, actors, and staging does it summon? International Tourism has been shot as a recording of a show on the scale of a whole country, North Korea. Museums, painters’ studios, cinema production houses, or a chemical factory are presented to us by North Korean guides whose voices we never hear.

70 kilometers outside of Berlin, built on an old air base, sits an immense metal dome resembling a spaceship that today hosts a striking tropical park. Through the discovery of Tropical Islands and the multiple historical layers in which it is implanted, the film proposes a singular perspective on place and history, a poetic archaeology of our relationship with time, space, and illusion.

For the 30th anniversaire of FIDMarseille about thirty directors have done us the honor of offering us some very beautiful short films.

The ambassador used to come here often, say the young men rooting around with sticks in the undergrowth where the German cemetery used to be. But the treasures hurriedly hidden there by the colonial rulers before they fled are long since gone. And that’s how the road to Yaoundé eventually became overgrown, the area and its inhabitants were left to fend for themselves.

In I Like Politics too, Marie Voignier continues her attentive exploration of countries where imaginary worlds, layers of history and present-day issues are intertwined – from post-communist East Germany (Hinterland, FID 2009) to Africa (L’hypothèse du Mokele Mbembé, FID 2011, Tinselwood, FID 2017).