À ciel ouvert

La banlieue, c’est le paradis

2025

In the 1960s, the suburbs were meant to be modern havens for newcomers from rural France, Portugal, Spain, North Africa, and Africa, helping rebuild post-war France. Large housing complexes symbolized this ideal, offering comfort, heating, and electricity. But by the 1980s, disillusionment set in as economic crisis, unemployment, poverty, crime, racism, and police violence took hold. Mohamed Bouhafsi tells the story of a dream that didn’t last.

Africa Light / Gray Zone

2010

"Africa Light" - as white local citizens call Namibia. The name suggests romance, the beauty of nature and promises a life without any problems in a country where the difference between rich and poor could hardly be greater. Namibia does not give that impression of it. If you look at its surface it seems like Africa in its most innocent and civilized form. It is a country that is so inviting to dream by its spectacular landscape, stunning scenery and fascinating wildlife. It has a very strong tourism structure and the government gets a lot of money with its magical attraction. But despite its grandiose splendor it is an endless gray zone as well. It oscillates between tradition and modernity, between the cattle in the country and the slums in the city. It shuttles from colonial times, land property reform to minimum wage for everyone. It fluctuates between socialism and cold calculated market economy.

The silent walls

2010

Every city has its secrets, but it is probably inside houses, behind their silent walls, where they are most intense and human. The Alabado House was built in 1671 as part of Quito’s colonial Old City, surviving centuries of earthquakes, poverty and decay. Over the past five years, dozens of manual laborers have been working to restore it. But its miraculous beauty conceals a long and tragic history. For it was the oppressed indigenous masses who built the Old City, the largest in Latin America.

Druzhba: The Friendship Pipeline

2021

"The Pipeline of the Century -- How Soviet Natural Gas Came to the West" by director Matthias Schmidt shows touching personal memories. The production is a treasure trove of material in which previously unpublished visual material about the construction of the century and its builders can be seen. Writer & Director Matthias Schmidt ; A Co-Production by LOOKSfilm and MDR in Cooperation with ARTE

Eat Bitter

2023

A local construction worker and a Chinese engineer are assigned to build a bank in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, one of the poorest countries in the world. But time is short and resources are scarce, and there are rumours in the countryside that a new civil war is brewing. And as if all this wasn’t bad enough, their relationships to their wives are falling apart. ‘Eat Bitter’ mirrors the existential and mundane problems of the two men, while an unlikely friendship and mutual trust blossoms between them. However, the chaotic microcosm of the construction site also mirrors China’s contradictory role in 21st century Africa, with the bank itself as the ultimate symbol of money, power and illusion. Director duo Pascale Appora-Gnekindy and Ningyi Sun themselves represent each of the two cultures, and their film has a unique eye for the human fallibility and irony of it all, but also for how we can reach each other despite all our many differences.

Set In Stone

2017

The race to save the world's only dedicated Māori World War One Memorial from collapse reveals an unknown soldier's heroic story to the community he was once part of.

Sagrada Familia - Gaudi's challenge

2022

Combining real footage, archival footage, fiction and 3D modeling, this unseen documentary traces the history of this spectacular and unfinished work.

Men at Lunch

2013

This remarkable new documentary explores the story behind one of the most iconic images of the twentieth century: the 1932 photograph of workmen taking their lunch while perched on a girder high above New York City.

Work in Progress

2001

An author spends a year and a half filming what happens as a new apartment building is built in a neighborhood of Barcelona.

Singapore On Film

2019

Rare archive footage reveals what Singapore was like dating back to 1900, showing coolies sharing lunch, rickshaw pullers, a grand Peranakan funeral, and more.

Eiffel, les derniers secrets

2023

How to Live Forever

2011

Director Mark Wexler embarks on a worldwide trek to investigate just what it means to grow old and what it could mean to really live forever. But whose advice should he take? Does 94-year-old exercise guru Jack LaLanne have all the answers, or does Buster, a 101-year-old chain-smoking, beer-drinking marathoner? What about futurist Ray Kurzweil, a laughter yoga expert, or an elder porn star? Wexler explores the viewpoints of delightfully unusual characters alongside those of health, fitness and life-extension experts in this engaging new documentary, which challenges our notions of youth and aging with comic poignancy. Begun as a study in life-extension, How To Live Forever evolves into a thought-provoking examination of what truly gives life meaning.

Perfecting the Art of Longing

2021

Cut off from his loved ones due to the strict COVID-19 lockdown at the long-term care facility where he lives, a quadriplegic rabbi is filmed by his daughter while reflecting on love, mortality and longing.

Gyrischachen - von Sünden, Sofas und Cervelats

2016

A high-rise apartment built in the 1960s provides housing for 2500 people from 42 nations. Separated from the city by a river and bounded by towering sandstone cliffs, everyone attempts to live and survive in their own way. Foreigners who have a go at being Swiss, and Swiss who observe with scepticism. They meet in the corner shop run by an Iraqi living in exile, send their kids to a children’s club managed by a missionary, and old drinking mates meet regularly over a beer in the neighbourhood’s only bar. Despite all the differences, they are rather proud of the fact that they come from here.

An Opera for an Empire

2021

The amazing and epic story of how the Paris Opera House, the Palais Garnier, was built from 1852 to 1870, thanks to the decisive impulse of the French Emperor Napoleon III; a story that is also that of the birth of a golden age for orchestral music, opera and ballet; of the rise of the urban bourgeoisie turned social elite; and of a certain mysterious inhabitant of the darkest corners of a legendary place.