Towards the Battle

She is almost deaf and she lip-reads. He is an ex-convict. She wants to help him. He thinks no one can help except himself.

Benoit Jacquot's acclaimed 2002 film of Puccini's opera stars Angela Gheorghiu in the title role, with Roberto Alagna, Ruggero Raimondi and the Chorus and Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, under Antonio Pappano.

Santa Claus tries to outrun a gang of knife-wielding youth. It's one of several vignettes of Palestinian life in Israel - in a neighborhood in Nazareth and at Al-Ram checkpoint in East Jerusalem. Most of the stories are droll, some absurd, one is mythic and fanciful; few words are spoken. A man who goes through his mail methodically each morning has a heart attack. His son visits him in the hospital. The son regularly meets a woman at Al-Ram; they sit in a car, hands caressing. Once, she defies Israeli guards at the checkpoint; later, ninja-like, she takes on soldiers at a target range. A red balloon floats free overhead. Neighbors toss garbage over walls. Life goes on until it doesn't.

After years of absence, Ciro returns home to his mother's bedside. In the Colombian desert of Tatacoa, he meets those he fled and confronts the last guardians of a territory as fragile as it is enchanting.

Fleeing the June 1940 arrival of Hitler's army in Paris, a young war widow and her two children are rescued from dive-bombing German fighters by a cocky, reckless teenager. He finds them refuge in an abandoned house, but despite the fact that the family quickly comes to be depending much on his cunning and survival abilities, their cohabitation proves uneasy.

A drug smuggler is betrayed by his partner and is then forced to seek help from Russian mobsters.

When leaving an audition, Boris encounters Julia, who he hasn't seen for several years. Upset by seeing each other again, both confront a past that they'd fled.

Malak is a star singer who lives with her mother and her daughter, Loula, in her villa after her divorce. She falls in love with an opportunist called Lam'ey, so her daughter sets out to expose him with the help of her lover, a driver called Nasser, and the director, Ezz-ElDin who deeply loves Malak.

A group of soldiers is mobilized following the discovery of a bombshell on the beach where they now wait for the deminers. Among them, Lino, a young soldier back from a difficult mission abroad, seems to be miled away. A sudden intrusion will change the course of the night and his life.

Adelaide and her two children Jean and Sacha spend a few days together in the mountains. As she takes her family on lengthy hikes, she is hoping for them to discover the trace of a hidden memory.

The Hoffmann's are a famous couple of photographers. They are called to Berlin to shoot a significant commissioned series, but this work will not proceed as planned.

Fascination can drive us to take surprising action. In this same, perhaps illogical manner, I wanted, for my part, to return to the origins of "Zabriskie Point", the film by the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni. Can we rediscover in reality the meanings lost in fictions ? How does one belong, body and soul, to a work of this nature? To these questions, I set out to find an answer. Accompanied by my camera, I put into images this long voyage that would offer me the best, as well as the worst.

Emmanuel Croset is working by Bruno Dumont side mixing "Outside Satan". Throughout this crucial step of finalizing the movie, ideas and points of views are exchanged, confronted and mixed together. As a witness to this act of artistic creation beside this couple at work, "The Crash of the Legs of the Spider" seeks to uncover the stakes of Bruno Dumont's cinema.