EXILED Rohingya

An attempt to create a bridge between the different political positions that coexist, sometimes violently, in the Basque Country, in northern Spain.

This documentary bears witness to the events that took place more than thirty years before the filming of this movie, on October 17, 1961, in Paris, during the Algerian War. It is a work not only about historical truth but also about memory. Constructed primarily from interviews conducted with those involved in the events, along with archival footage, photographs, and radio broadcasts from the time, our investigation proves that nearly 200 Algerians were killed (drowned, tortured) that night and in the days that followed by the French police. "A Missing Day" seeks to ask two key questions: how could such events have unfolded in the capital of a Western democracy barely thirty years ago? And why have they been silenced ever since?

On October 17 and 18, 1961, during a non-violent demonstration against the imposed curfew, dozens of Algerians were murdered in Paris by police officers acting on orders from their superiors. For forty years, this crime has been concealed; yet these events, the deadliest on French soil since the Second World War, resemble, in some respects, the darkest hours of the collaboration. Why has this history been hidden? Under what conditions, and in the name of what reasons, did officials of a democratic state conceal the scale and gravity of such events?

Three demonstrators from October 17, 1961, and a journalist recount the peaceful success of the demonstration and its brutal repression in the streets of Paris. Five months before the end of the Algerian War, the Gaullist government violently suppressed (40 to 300 deaths in a single evening, according to various sources) a peaceful demonstration by the entire Algerian civilian population of the Paris region, protesting the curfew imposed solely on this population (all participants held French citizenship). The government long denied this state crime; the official version: 3 deaths! In 1962, these events were granted amnesty by a simple decree (later enacted into law) issued by the same Gaullist government.

On October 17, 1961, in response to the curfew imposed on Muslim Algerians by Paris police prefect Maurice Papon, the FLN Federation of France organized a peaceful demonstration in the streets of the capital. The demonstration turned into a bloody crackdown: unprecedented violence, thousands of arrests, hundreds missing, and dozens dead. Today, much is known about the violence of that night: at least 200 Algerians were killed, beheaded, beaten, or thrown into the Seine; 11,500 others were arrested and often tortured. Hundreds were deported back to Algeria. Long silenced, the repression has been acknowledged thanks to the work of remembrance and eyewitness accounts.

In Aukland Harbour, New Zealand, on July 10th 1985, French navy combat frogmen placed two mines against the hull of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior, sinking the ship and killing photographer Fernando Pereira.

Turkey's history has been shaped by two major political figures: Mustafa Kemal (1881-1934), known as Atatürk, the Father of the Turks, founder of the modern state, and the current president Recep Tayyıp Erdoğan, who apparently wants Turkey to regain the political and military pre-eminence it had as an empire under the Ottoman dynasty.

In the bitter winter of 1978, four desperate council members from a small Virginia town hatched a daring Bigfoot hoax to save it from the brink of bankruptcy. But as the money grew, so did the greed-triggering the town's first unsolved murder.

Gdańsk, Poland, September 1980. Lech Wałęsa and other Lenin shipyard workers found Solidarność (Solidarity), the first independent trade union behind the Iron Curtain. The long and hard battle to bring down communist dictatorship has begun.

The Katyn massacre, carried out by the Soviet NKVD in 1940, was only one of many unspeakable crimes committed by Stalin's ruthless executioners over three decades. The mass murder of thousands of Polish officers was part of a relentless purge, the secrets and details of which have only recently been partially revealed.

Filmed along the Myanmar-Bangladesh border and within Rohingya refugee camps, Shafiur Rahman’s documentary on the 2017 Tula Toli massacre exposes chilling interviews and evidence of Myanmar military’s premeditated atrocities. The film documents mass killings, sexual violence, and the systematic destruction of the village of Tula Toli, highlighting a humanitarian crisis that forced over half a million people—many of them children—to flee in an exodus of historic scale.

This Kind of Love follows Burmese human rights and LGBT activist, Aung Myo Min, as he returns home after 24 years in exile. Set against Myanmar's historical transition from half a century of brutal military rule, Myo shares his vision for equality for all - from children to transgender people to ethnic nationalities with his countrymen, to be part of his homeland's emergence from the darkness of dictatorship. Myo's story celebrates his belief that community and inclusion are fundamental to creating meaningful political and social change in Burma/Myanmar.

How does it feel to be forgotten by the world? A powerful collective cry denouncing the crimes of the military dictatorship installed in Myanmar after the coup perpetrated on February 1, 2021: cinema and imagination against horror and in defense of freedom.

South Africa, July 11th, 1963. Several members of the African National Congress, an organization declared illegal, are arrested in Rivonia, a country house near Johannesburg. The detainees, along with Nelson Mandela, imprisoned since 1962, are charged with serious crimes for their radical activism against the apartheid regime.

Under the pretext of fighting terrorism or crime, the major powers have embarked on a dangerous race for surveillance technologies. Facial recognition cameras, emotion detectors, citizen rating systems, autonomous drones… A security obsession that in some countries is giving rise to a new form of political regime: numerical totalitarianism. Orwell's nightmare.

What happens when non-violent leaders are pushed to support armed struggle against a brutal regime in a forgotten war? Thabyay: Creative Resistance in Myanmar follows four democracy revolutionaries who are finding creative means to fight against the military junta. Some take up arms while struggling to stay true to their commitment to non-violence, while others engage in “artivism,” using music, poetry and art to bring about a peaceful, free, democratic and truly inclusive future for all people in Myanmar.

Mother, Daughter, Sister (Amae, Thamee, Ama) exposes the Burmese military’s practice of using rape as a weapon of war and gives voice to Kachin and Rohingya women activists calling for justice for these crimes. Mother, Daughter, Sister revolves around the stories of four women: Shamima, a volunteer counselor working with survivors of military rape in the Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh, Dil Kayas, a teenage survivor, and San Lung and Lu Ra, sister and mother of two Kachin school teachers brutally raped and killed in 2015, allegedly by the Burmese military. Powerful testimonies from survivors, witnesses, and activists explore the far-reaching impact of sexual violence and trauma upon these communities, and together, the women call for justice and an end to the army's impunity.

June 1941, during World War II. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler orders the mass abduction of particularly well-bred young children from Poland and the occupied territories of the Soviet Union in order to be educated in German culture, by both state schools and German families…

The story of what daily life was like in Poland under communism: private conversations, cruel interrogations, recruitment attempts, recorded and filmed with hidden devices; of how the secret services spied on every activity of ordinary citizens: nothing escaped the brutal system of control developed by the Soviets in the name of freedom.

Padauk: Myanmar Spring takes the viewer to the streets of Myanmar during the heady days following the February 2021 military coup. Through Nant, a young, first-time protester, we meet three human rights activists whose lives have been turned upside down by the coup. As the protests continue, Nant comes to understand the truth of a brutal regime that has continued to wage war against its own people for decades. Against a foreboding backdrop, Nant’s political awakening regarding the plight of others in her ethnically diverse country gives hope for the future. Beautifully augmented by poetry and art, Padauk: Myanmar Spring shows the resilience and determination of the people of Myanmar, and the sacrifices they've made.