EN EL TUMULTO DE LA CALLE / LA BALA DE SANDOVAL / TERRES FANTÔMES / FORDLANDIA MALAISE

In the 1970s, a new planning policy forced residents of several villages in the interior of Gaspésie to leave their homes and move to the coast. Félix Lamarche explores the consequences of this brutal, disturbing event. While the episode is now largely forgotten, it had a profound impact on those who lived through it. The filmmaker records their stories and recollections, giving them substance through ghostly images of the forests, buildings and landscapes from which they were uprooted. The director’s experimental approach emerges as the only way to do justice to a bygone era and people’s deep attachment to their land.

Death and life dance together in this poetic short filmed in the streets of Mexico City. It is the fall of 2017, 32 years after the 1985 earthquake. While cracked buildings testify to the violence of a new quake, preparations for the Day of the Dead are in full swing. Flowers, music and masks come out to combat despair and fear. In grainy images in which reality becomes ghostly and ghosts come to life, Étienne Lacelle’s keen eye captures fleeting moments in the streets, markets and squares, embodying the chance encounter of the two sides of existence. Amidst a joyful atmosphere, the dead are not forgotten. To the contrary, the celebration is a stand against the fragility of fate.

Sometimes we barely escape with our life, and we ask ourselves how heavily chance, coincidence and fate weigh in our adventure on this Earth. A ball and a broken bottle both came close to ending Sandoval’s life. But he survived, with his brother, to tell his story. Filmed in 16mm in the Ecuadorian rainforest, this experimental short leads us to the hazy margins of existence. Jean-Jacques Martinod accompanies his unusual story with a stream of atmospheric, sometimes purely abstract, images. Music and silence, light and dark, reality and visions: all come together in this introspective sensory excursion, somewhere on the border between life and death.

In 1928, Henry Ford founded an industrial town in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. Its purpose was to produce rubber for the U.S. auto industry. The project was a failure, leaving a ghost town as atestament to a certain brand of doomed economic neocolonialism. Susana de Sousa Dias captures the strange atmosphere of a utopia turned dystopia, thanks to drone shots and superb black and white cinematography. Through archival footage, testimonials and Indigenous stories, she also sheds light on another history: that of the people deemed invisible despite living on the land for millennia without damaging it. They are the land’s living memory, and their myths and songs challenge the hegemony of capitalist “progress” while counteracting the desolation.