Aka Ana

During one night, a man travels, drinks, takes drugs, meets women, in a prostitution zone on the border between Mexico and the United States. An attempt to extend the photographic work of Antoine d'Agata into cinema.

The renowned French Magnum photographer - again and always - uses his sublime camera and whole being to reveal a parallel world of prostitution and drugs, punctuated by exhausted bodies and lost souls in Cambodia, Russia and India. Disturbing surely, but also transcendental.

The acclaimed work of photographer Antoine d’Agata has mostly been a journey into the heart of darkness, dealing with random and nightly encounters, sex and prostitution. So it's no surprise that the monumental White Noise leads again to the underworld of sex workers, from Cambodia to Norway, from Ukraine to USA. Built around more than 20 monologues, this film delivers trance-like visions of women in rapture induced by sex or narcotics.

"And may he return without the help of any man or god." Odyssey, Book V, 31-32

The bare life draws us into a hallucinating journey: from the incandescent set of a city under lockdown, with the rare survivors wandering aimlessly, to a hospital where the nurses and the patients carrying the virus are applying a daily ritual of life and death gestures. Antoine d’Agata transforms these opaque spaces into a theatre of shadows, freed from all pretences of reality, and obliterates the very surface of things, the skin of beings and the skin of the world, only to better reveal its tragic dimension.

Inspired by the photographic travels of Antione d'Agata, Danielle Arbid's worldly drama follows a French photographer who travels the globe to seek out the most extreme experiences imaginable. Thomas is a fearless shutterbug who's always willing to put his life on the line for the sake of a good shot. Upon falling under the spell of an enigmatic old man named Fouad Saleh, the photographer travels to the Far East in hopes of uncovering the secrets of the man who can no longer recall his own past. As the photographer soon finds out, it's often the most innocent endeavors that yield the most profound and transformative results.