The 4th Lab Doc welcomes its laureates
May 1, 2023
The 4th edition of Lab Doc will welcome 9 authors of 1st or 2nd feature-length documentary films from the Mediterranean basin. They will exchange with the speakers Leïla Kilani & Shu Aiello, during 3 sessions in residence of one week each (between May and November), in Marseille.
The first session will take place from 8 to 12 May 2023.
Claire Simon is this year the godmother of the 4th Lab Doc, author of several documentary films such as Les Patients, Récréations, Le village, or Coûte que coûte, awarded in many festivals.
" Her work is essentially composed of documentaries in which she tracks down stories, those that children invent for themselves during recess, the one that management difficulties induce in Coûte que coûte, the one that arises from the love of two young people (800 km difference- Romance), or the one that is woven by Mimi's singular life. In fact, for Claire Simon, if banality contains fiction, the filmmaker's job is to flush it out. "
Here are the words addressed by Mrs. Simon to this year's residents:
" Jean Christophe proposed me to sponsor the fourth edition of the Lab Doc and I am honored, I hope to be up to it... It is not won, I know... I wish you all courage, perseverance and also to sleep well, laugh a lot and not to take your project too tragically. I always found it easier to have good ideas than to make good films. So writing a project is like dreaming and convincing yourself at the same time that this dream is great, unique, and doing a great tap dance number with people who don't like dancing and seem a bit uptight, even sinister... Good luck!!!! "
Claire Simon
Samia Al Kayar
They recently got out of prison. Cyrille Canetti, a psychiatrist, after having practiced there for 25 years. His patients after serving their sentences.Month after month, Cyrille now receives them in the privacy of his new office at the hospital. Broken by incarceration, these men are gradually trying to repair their lives. He is gradually trying to get rid of a prison world that still sticks to him.
Leïla Aoudj
What does it mean to be a woman artist today? With her camera and her one look, an Algerian photographer explores her place in the art world. How do her photographs convey the way she looks at the world? How can photography be used to immortalize the moment and highlight aspects of society that are often ignored?
Kahina Benakli
Kahina Benakli, living in Paris, an actress by training, in her thirties, discovers, post confinement, a passion for English boxing. It is while visiting her family in the South of France that she learns that four of her grandfather's brothers were great boxers, champions in the 1950s. She then decides to embark on a quest to revive her sacred great-uncles. A journey between history and memories, between France and Morocco.
Sonia Kichah
In politically divided Tunisia, between Islamists and progressives, five young women aged 28 to 38 share a modest roommate in a residential building. Having come to work in the country's largest city, far from their families and reproving glances, the path to freedom is marked by hardships. Shunned by the conservatives who consider them as girls of little virtue, they face a rejection fed by tough prejudices. Nevertheless, the small group of women supports and supports each other. They even welcome a new roommate: a white chiwawa, who carefully observes the lives of the house's inhabitants.
Cyrine Ben Chahla
The telephone call, being initially a tender and human act, has been recuperated by the consumer society in call centers whose purpose is to "sell" political opinions, commercial offers, products, hope. This film uses the call center as a writing process and is guided by chance, generosity, and the need to talk. A call center conducts a psychological survey on happiness among Tunisians. The film is the result of the survey
Emma Paoli
In a devastated Lebanon, Munir, Jamil and the other bathers seem indifferent to the crisis. They sunbathe indolently, a chicha at the corner of their mouths on the last public beach of Beirut with the appearance of an island of freedom. All the social classes and religious communities of this small fragmented country meet there. Imams, poets, Hezbollah supporters, alcoholics, singers, intellectuals or Syrian refugees clash their destinies in an odyssey of oiled bodies. A fragile coexistence threatened by the collapse of Lebanon.
Myriam Raccah
Sophie had to flee her native Egypt forever in 1956, in the context of the Suez crisis. She never forgot it.Woman-rabbi and Arab immigrant, brilliant mathematician and housewife, she will have been crossed by her time while displaying a candid strength that questions me - between the passivity of the victims and the suspension of the wise.In a film-essay in the first person, mixing archival footage, home movies and animated objects of memory, I trace the story of this particular history - that of my grandmother - against the backdrop of the great history and the political and identity-related questions it raises in me today. Between Paris and Cairo, between present and past, the fragmentary portrait of a complex woman emerges...
Davide Crudetti
Il Grande Buco" is a creative documentary that, starting from the personal history of the author, will open to a collective and generational dimension.Intermingling the use of private and historical archive images with images shot in the present time, the film traces a subjective journey within the left-wing social movements in Italy, from the 1960s until today. The hole between the two rooms of the new house where the two authors live, is the point from which all their thoughts are born.The choice to have or not to have a child becomes the pretext to represent the disorientation of a whole generation (that of the thirty-year-olds today) facing the future.
Paola Di Mitri
Il Grande Buco" is a creative documentary that, starting from the personal history of the author, will open to a collective and generational dimension.Intermingling the use of private and historical archive images with images shot in the present time, the film traces a subjective journey within the left-wing social movements in Italy, from the 1960s until today. The hole between the two rooms of the new house where the two authors live, is the point from which all their thoughts are born.The choice to have or not to have a child becomes the pretext to represent the disorientation of a whole generation (that of the thirty-year-olds today) facing the future.