Content from Cobra Films

Nopumoceno, the most successful businessman in the Cabo Verde archipelogo, is an ambitious, clever opportunist, known during his lifetime as "eternity single". However, he is then discovered by his illegitimate daughter to have gotten his fortune and his women in unorthodox and incredible ways

Le Cercle des noyés is the name given in Mauritania to black political prisoners imprisoned from 1987 in the old colonial fortress of Oualata. This film touches on the fragile process of unveiling memories by one of these former prisoners who remembers his story and that of his companions. In a visual echo, the places of their confinement come one after another denuded from any traces of that past.

In the wings of the opera "Maraina", the film combines history and oral memory, to recount in music the first contacts between the natives in the Indian Ocean Islands and the Europians. The film follows the cast's fantastic journey to the place where it all began: Fort-Dauphin, in southern Madagascar. Two differents versions of a moment in African history: one related by the French officers back in the mid-17th century, and the other one by the Malagasy people. The characters tell their own vision of a common past. There was war of course but there were also love stories between those young French soldiers and beautiful Malagasy princesses. A fascinating voyage through Madagascar today, at the heart of its beliefs.

This polyphonic film by the Belgian film artist about the history of Europe and art is an unforgettable, sensual journey between memory and nightmare. To a meditative, threatening soundtrack, we hear a series of monologues by poets and crazy people, mothers and children. Meanwhile, the image forces the eye to reflect on what and where.

In Managua, Nicaragua, teenager Sujeylin Aguilar raises her newborn daughter Karla on the same streets she has been calling home for the past eight years. Based in a city park and part of a larger group of youngsters, mother and baby struggle to reach the little one's first birthday. Beautifully told and full of hope, Karla's Arrival offers an intense personal story about second generation street children.

When giants die let three generations look back on the street happenings around parties and manifestations. The grandfather appears as a ghost and represents processions organized by order of cities and municipalities. It is his son who places the parades in a series of processions, historical processions, parades, traditional parties and carnival parties. Criticism and attraction play their game. Finally, the grandson searches for contemporary forms and points to demonstrations, manifestations. Reclaiming the street, forming a community, expressing thoughts on the street, together outside, ... 'The street, the mother of democracy', is how it sounds through a robot-controlled horn. To give up the street is to lose freedom.

"Beyond the Ararat" is the story of a woman of Turkish origin who embarks on a journey to better understand what makes up her identity. A road movie which brings her from her childhood neighborhood in Brussels to Turkey and Armenia. A quest where each woman she encounters could be the reflection of herself. Entering the land of her ancestors, Anatolia, she questions her cultural heritage. Stopping in her grandmother's village, she discovers the "Agit"; an antique oral tradition where women sing for their dead. The songs open a potential space for mourning, where Turkish, Kurdish but also Armenian women missing from that land, can sing "together". The confrontation with the "missing" from her memory, brings her farther eastward in Anatolia to the foot of the Ararat Mountain, and beyond.

In 1956, Louis Carré bought, on the advice of his friend Jean Monnet, a piece of land near Paris in order to build a new house. Wil Grohmann, a Berlin art critic, put him in touch with the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, who would complete the construction of this house three years later. This historical anecdote is the origin of a trip through Europe that links the Carré house and the experimental house, built in Finland by Aalto, with buildings located in Brussels, Venice and Porto. These places, whose history resonates with European history, question, thanks to knowledge from the sciences, the existence of the membranes (whatever it is : a micro-organism, a house, a state, …) that allow a place to develop, to interact with the outside world. In the end, this film favors the notion of exchange over that of borders and evokes the possibility of tracing other paths within the European space.

Human beings who have experienced such a strong shock that they are no longer even afraid of death (as it often happens to genocide survivors) sometimes fall into what is known as a feeling of timelessness or a “melancholy”. They live somewhat “outside” time, a mode of extra-temporal existence, waiting for the day on which they will be freed from their suffering. It is the people — almost ghosts having survived the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenians and Azerbaijani that has lasted for almost twenty years — that the filmmaker shows and listens to in his film. Behind them, behind their wandering bodies, behind their frenzies, is what remains of the collapse of the Soviet Union in Caucasus: ruins, uninhabited spaces, tombs, vestiges of war, trenches where soldiers watch for an invisible enemy.

Arbres is the story of the Tree and trees. It begins with the Origins and then embarks upon a journey through the world of the tree and the trees of the world. The film reveals the huge differences and slight similarities between the Tree and Man, investigating the fascinating idea that, amongst plants, the tree fulfils the role played by man in the animal kingdom.

Under the White Mask: The Film Haesaerts Could Have Made uses fragments of Under the Black Mask, a 1958 film about Congolese art directed by the Belgian artist Paul Haesaerts, which has been qualified as colonial propaganda. This new film imagines what the masks – now subjects, and not objects – would say. Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism is spoken in Lingala for the first time. This speech is still a critical mirror for Europe. Under The White Mask is limited to the elements already existing in 1958.

How do Europeans deal with their recent dark history (the wars, dictatorships and occupations)? What traces are etched?

Straddling a 2,400-kilometer-long wall constructed by the Moroccan army, the Western Sahara is today divided into two sections — one occupied by Morocco, the other under the control of the Sahrawi National Liberation Movement’s Polisario Front. Drawing from stories of flight, exile, interminable waiting and the arrested, persecuted lives on both sides of that wall, this film bears witness to the Sahrawi people, their land, their entrapment in other people’s dreams. In an esthetic that sublimates the real, Lost Land resonates like a score that juxtaposes sonorous landscapes, black-and-white portraits and nomadic poetics.

Guided by the sheepbells of a flock and by the evocations of the lost, this film is a voyage through storms; those of the mountains and winter, those of bodies and souls, those which remind us that which nature has not obtained from our reason, obtaining from our madness.

Hélène, a struggling young actress, is trying to learn the text of the 'Lady From the Sea' by heart. At the same time she is emptying her grandmother’s apartment. The apartment, situated near the beach, becomes a place to escape in thoughts and dreams.

I travelled across Mauritania to find a tree that I saw from my window in Belgium. It wasn't a mythical tree, but rather one that could be anywhere. On my way, I met men and women who shared their perception of this quest and in doing so, in a roundabout way they shared some of their visions of the world and of existence. For some, my tree was the sign from the spirits, of the invisible or a call from light. For others, it was the symbol of a history, a culture or the end of a period in time. For yet others, it was a tree that you see only when you get lost...

Starting in Germany before crossing into Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, Vers la mer (To the Sea) is a documentary-voyage filmed in black-and-white by Annik Leroy, as she traces the River Danube from its source to the estuary of the Black Sea.