LabDoc 2020
The first edition of Lab Doc, Meditalents' documentary writing residency, took place in Marseille in 3 sessions of 5 days spread between October 2020 and April 2021.
The 1st session took place from October 5 to 8, 2020
The 2nd session took place from January 4 to 8, 2021
The 3rd session took place from April 5 to 9, 2021.
The Godfather of the first edition of Lab Doc was Jean Labib, Film Director and Producer.
Thomas Ellis
Director, after studying at ESSEC, he directed his first documentary Palestines in 2006 selected at the Locarno Festival. He then founded the production company Babel in India in 2007, then in the United States in 2010 and in Brazil in 2013. Living mainly in New Delhi, he produced during these years nearly 400 magazines and documentaries for television. In 2020, he decided to leave his role as producer to return to directing in Marseille.
Cargo Kids
From an old hotel in La Joliette to the Place de l'Opéra, dozens of young people survey Marseille as if it were the New World. Through their superhero eyes, the city takes on a dreamlike, unusual look. They are between 13 and 17 years old, and like all teenagers, they have dreams in common: to become a scientist, a soccer player, a singer. Each day is a new step in the conquest of these dreams. Between administrative epic and friendly celebrations, they jump from challenge to challenge with a prodigious energy. All of them have fled their country and, having arrived clandestinely in Marseille, set off towards a new life.
Marius Vanmalle
Since high school Marius Vanmalle has been making short films for fun. It is only after studying political science that he decides to really branch out towards cinema and to engage in a training in documentary cinema. After a work experience in a production company he decides in 2020 to devote himself fully to the direction of his first feature film "Solid".
Solid
Solid Mike is the guy who rolls with the punches. Marseillais, tall, big, joking, macho. For a little over a year, Solid Mike has been a Youtuber. And like thousands of Youtubers, Solid Mike wants to make the buzz. On the internet, his fans are categorical: "Solid Mike, you're going to make it! For them, he is their rising star. But for me, Solid Mike is above all Mickaël, my high school friend...
Matthieu Kairouz
Matthieu Kairouz is a young Franco-Lebanese director and photographer. After studying African History at the Sorbonne, which led him to live in the West and East of the African continent, as well as a year of training in documentary film at the DEMC of Paris VII, he decided to devote himself to documentary filmmaking.Dekken is his first feature documentary project in direct cinema. A film, which through Ahmad and his shop, could be a reflection of today's Bcharré, a village located in the high mountains of northern Lebanon.
Dekken (L’échoppe)
Since leaving Syria 8 years ago, Ahmad has been running a small shop in the high mountains of northern Lebanon, in Bcharré, my village. This place has many facets. It turns out to be a point of gravity on the village square and proves to be a "crossroads" for the inhabitants, a closed place that nevertheless opens to the outside.
Tatiana Botovelo
Tatiana Botovelo is a young director based in Marseille. After studying social and cultural anthropology, she specializes in cinema and enrolled in the master's program in documentary writing at Aix-Marseille University. In 2021, she met Lassana, the protagonist of her first documentary film in progress, Alias.
La Vie d'Alias
Lassana is 24 years old, with laughing eyes, and scars on his body. He is originally from Guinea-Conakry and does not have the right to live and work legally in Marseille. However, he has been a construction worker for six years and is involved in the urban restructuring of this city. Behind closed doors, in his home, the film follows Lassana's daily strategies and future prospects in this city in perpetual transformation.
Hugo Saugier
Hugo Saugier grew up in France, in the mountains of the Hautes-Alpes. At 17, he took the winding roads to the city to learn video editing, get stranded in television and then study at an art school. In recent years, he has led many explorations around video and sound: making music videos, video performances, organizing a music festival played on giant horns. It is finally as a salesman in a grocery store in Lyon that he met the producers of his first film project, a documentary about the strange mountain that overlooks his parents' village. He is also a stage manager for various theaters and cultural venues in Marseille.
La Traversée Héroïque
Somewhere in the Hautes-Alpes, a shepherd and his flock of sheep climb a mountain. Soon the herd settles on the desert plateau of Bure, at the feet of the giant parabolas of a radio astronomical observatory. In an atmosphere of the end of the world, and while the shepherd watches over his animals, the antennas spread out towards the sky.
Yzza Slaoui
Yzza Slaoui is a Moroccan documentary filmmaker and photographer. After studying ethnography and documentary film at UCL in London, Yzza moved into filmmaking, seeking to combine her interests in film and the study of contemporary Arab societies. Her work focuses primarily on issues of social and gender inequality.
Fraises amères
Every year, a circular migration program signed between Spain and Morocco sees thousands of legal seasonal workers arrive on Iberian soil. Saloua Amrani, a 43-year-old Moroccan widow, thus spends four months a year, away from her five children, two of whom are infants, harvesting strawberries in Andalusia to support her family. Bitter Strawberries offers an intimate view of the female experience of seasonal work.
Walid Sahraoui
Born in Algiers, I trained as a historian at the University of Saint Quentin en Yvelines in France, before returning to Algeria and working in infrastructure construction for over a decade.Founding member of PortaVoz a cultural association based in Oran with a vocation to promote cinema and culture in general in Oran, I am also a member of the programming team of the Rencontres Internationales du Cinéma d'Oran, whose second Edition is scheduled for late 2020. I have started for more than a year the writing of my first documentary film.
Mille Plateaux
A Thousand Plateaus is a documentary road movie that follows my journey from the city of Oran to the heart of the Algerian highlands, this journey is an opportunity to take the pulse of a country in perpetual motion, to explore this territory, to meditate on it, to enter its folds or its margins. It is also the intimate story of the mourning of a mother lost and found at the edges of this space.
Luisa Porrino
Luisa Porrino, born in Biella, Piedmont, has an important family history of entrepreneurship in the textile industry, beginning in the early 20th century. After graduating in photography from Southgate Greater College in London, she worked for seven years as an assistant director for films, TV series, commercials and documentaries (Boris the series - Telecom Ghandi) - and also as line producer and production assistant to Alessandro Verdecchi mainly for international co-productions. She wrote, directed and produced in 2005 her first short film entitled Il Bordo, presented at the Turin Film Festival.In 2018 she launched her first feature film with Misami Films, the film entitled La Freccia del Tempo directed by Carlo Sarti, the first scientific comedy produced with the Film Fund of the Emilia-Romagna Region, private investors and in collaboration with the University Alma Mater Studiorum of Bologna, the main location of the film. The film will be released in theaters in Italy in 2019/2020.
Tramonto a Nord Ovest
In the Alpine arc between France and Italy, a clash of civilizations is shaping up. Luca (20) is on his way to his friend Paolo's (28) pasture. He falls into the river when he spots a mysterious and magical golden trout. He is found unconscious by Naila (25) and her brother Yuseef (16), refugees fleeing a bloody Syria.
Jean-Robert Viallet
Jean-Robert Viallet is a film director and journalist. He was awarded the Albert Londres prize in 2010 for his trilogy La mise à mort du travail (The Death of Work), an immersion into the heart of large global corporations. His work focuses on the gray areas of power, the fractures of contemporary society and environmental issues. He has worked on the business of teenage reform camps in the USA (Les enfants perdus de Tranquility Bay), and international arms trafficking (Une femme à abattre). He has now turned his attention to the dangerous links between arms dealers and French political parties in a documentary series of six 52' episodes, about which the daily Le Monde writes: "As breathless, convoluted and humanly powerful as the best fiction series, Manipulation, une histoire française deserves to be revisited by watching all six episodes in succession, the better to savor its exhilarating and terrifying dramaturgy. After a film at the heart of France's bangs and those forgotten by the global economy (La France en face), he co-wrote with Alice Odiot a diptych about two families facing justice (Jusqu'à ce que la mort nous sépare, Le mauvais œil ). He then produced a worldwide investigation into the commodification of higher education (Etudiants: L'avenir à crédit). In 2019, he will complete L'homme a mangé la terre, an all-archival fresco that tells a counter-history of progress. Des Hommes, his latest film co-directed with Alice Odiot, a feature-length documentary selected for ACID-CANNES 2019, was released in cinemas in February 2019.
Victor Ede
Victor Ede was editor (In Libris Editions), chief editor, then producer from 2015 at Cinephage productions, the company he founded with Jean-Robert Viallet. Trained at Eurodoc, he has produced seven films, including three international co-productions and one feature-length film, and is developing a line of documentaries with a strong international focus. Victor Ede is a reader and deputy member of the CNC's FAI commission, and an additional member of the PROCIREP ANGOA commission. Member of the Eurodoc network, DAE, president of the SUDPACA producers association (LPA).
Filmography (producer):
- L’homme a mangé la Terre - Jean Robert Viallet, 98min, 2019
- Leoforio - Catherine Catella et Shu Aiello, 2019
- La Zone Rouge - Tristan Thil, 2018
- Privacy Of Wounds - Dalia Khury, 2018
- Loin des Quartiers Nord - Benjamin Géminel, 2017
- Congo Paradiso - Benjamin Géminel et Tristan Thil, 2016
- Boy Saloum - Audrey Gallet, 2015
Yaël Bitton
She has been making films for over 25 years, collaborating with directors from France, Switzerland, the USA, Colombia, Mexico, India, Israel, Serbia, ...
In addition to editing, she works as an editing and scriptwriting consultant, notably for Rough Cut Service, Doc Montevideo, Circle, Visions du Réel, Dok Incubator, Ex Oriente, Doc Aviv, and Doc Point. She worked as an editing lecturer at HEAD/ Cinéma du Réel in Geneva from 2008 to 2018. She was recently invited to be a member of the Academy of the Oscars in the field of documentary. Her most recent works include: Dans tes yeux je vois mon pays by Kamal Hachkar 2019, Radio Silence by Juliana Fanjul 2019, Advocate by Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellaiche 2019, D'Angelo-The chosen one by Carine Bjilsma 2019, The Edge of Democracy by Petra Costa 2019 (consultant Montage et Scénario), One more Jump by Manu Gerosa 2019 (editing supervisor), Rétrospective by Jérôme Bel 2019, Soeurs Jarariju by Jorge Cadena 2018, Las fantasmas del Caribe by Felipe Monroy 2018, Disappearances by Anat Even 2016, Machines by Rahul Jain 2016, The wonderful kingdom of Papa Alaev by Noam Pinchas and Tal Barda 2015, Muchachas by Juliana Fanjul 2014, Jugando con los pajaros by Simona Canonica 2014. From 1995 to 1999, she worked as editing supervisor for various feature films in the USA, including Lisbon story by Wim Wenders, Girlfight by Karin Kusama, Hamlet by Michael Almereyda... She has directed two feature-length documentaries: Not for Sale, 2003; The Rabbi's 12 children, 2007; as well as various shorter formats for television.
" In a dream world, there would be as many scripts as there are documentaries. "