Être vivant

Daily life in a Marseille overnight shelter. Caught between last-resort solutions and feeling trapped, three hundred men try to thwart urgency.

In a universe that looks like nothingness, two beings seem to exist only to come into contact.

Abel Ferrara headlines a film retrospective and a series of concerts in France dedicated to songs and music from his films. Preparations with his family and friends will form the material of this self portrait, showing another side of the director of legendary films BAD LIEUTENANT, THE KING OF NEW YORK and THE ADDICTION. Ferrara is joined on stage by past collaborators, including composer Joe Delia, actor-singer Paul Hipp and his wife actress Cristina Chiriac for concerts at the Metronum in Toulouse and the Salo Club in Paris in October 2016.

October 2018, France. Macron’s government decrees a tax increase on the price of fuel. A wave of protests starts to grow. Citizens mobilize throughout the country: this is the beginning of the Yellow Vests movement. In Chartres, a group of men and women gather daily. Among them, Agnès, Benoît, Nathalie and Allan commit themselves to the collective struggle. Like a whole nation, they discover that they have a voice to be heard...

Lao Yang is head of logistics of the group. He is responsible for the equipment, building materials and food (mainly chickens) to arrive in the isolated Chinese prefab camp. The Congolese government was supposed to deliver these things but so far the team hasn't received anything. With Eddy (a Congolese man who speaks Mandarin fluently) as an intermediate, Lao Yang is forced to leave the camp and deal with local Congolese entrepreneurs, because without the construction materials the road works will cease. What follows is an endless, harsh, but absurdly funny roller coaster of negotiations and misunderstandings, as Lao Yang learns about the Congolese way of making deals.

Kabwita, a young man living with his wife and daughters in Kolwezi, a town in the southwest of the Democratic Republic of Congo, dreams of buying land to build a house. To do so, he produces charcoal (makala), extracted from the ashes of a mighty hardwood tree. Carrying the sacks of charcoal on the back of his bicycle, he embarks on a dangerous journey to sell them on the market.

Abel Ferrara explores human conflict and the search for peace and balance through the music and words of Patti Smith and the experiences of people at war in Ukraine.

In the fields, we see them, extended on the grass or grazing peacefully. Large placid beasts that we thought we knew because they are livestock. Lions, gorillas, bears have our attention, but has anyone ever really looked at cows? Asked what they were doing with their days? What do they do when a storm passes? When the sun comes back? What do they think when they stand motionless, seemingly contemplating the void? Do they think? "Bovines" chronicles the true life of a cow: grazing, ruminating, gazing - but also feeling - mooing with grief, or just enjoying an apple…

A building site in Lebanon: 4 men and a young boy on the roof of a building. Their daily job: to destroy it. Without commentary, punctuated by the noise of the masses and the collapse of walls, the film offers us an understanding of a piece of life, in its temporality, in its social and political dimension.