6 short films will be made at the end of the year in Algeria, Tunisia, Burkina Faso, Mozambique and Benin.

The six projects selected from 30 entries originating in 7 African countries all provide a different perspective on passages in Africa’s cities. The completed films will consist of
animation, docu-fiction, documentary, fiction or “mockumentary” and their approaches will be political, symbolic, fantasy, comical, architectural or urban.

The selected young filmmakers will receive help from local professionals and IVM experts to write their screenplays and organise the production of their films. The partner organisations will provide the necessary technical equipment. The six films, made in late 2015, will be distributed at the Passages international touring exhibition from spring 2016 and at audiovisual events.

THE PROJECTS

L’Arrêt

Leïla Aoudj (Algiers, Algeria)

Fiction: in the course of a car ride along a seaside boulevard, a young couple experiences the beginnings of an adult relationship, cut short by a police roadblock. The boulevard is seen as a transitional space between two worlds, between city and country, imprisonment and freedom, here and elsewhere.

Alger entre de bas en haut

Nesrine Dahmoun (Algiers, Algeria)

Docu-fiction: Amina’s trip on the Algiers subway and then by cable car highlights the transformation in users’ day-to-day experience and their relations to urban space wrought by the arrival of new methods of transport, which also constitute transitional spaces between the worlds of reality and imagination.

Entre deux rives

Evelyne Agli (Cotonou, Benin)

Documentary: the author visits her friend Epiphane. The latter is a priest in the parish, who travels to Gbodjè by car, by boat or on foot, depending on the season. In this hamlet, cut off by a river, the inhabitants have built a bridge to access Cotonou at high water time.

Coup de balai sur le pont

Nabaloum Boureima (Burkina Faso)

Short animated film: during the popular uprising against the Blaise Compaoré regime on October 31, 2014, a bridge is the arena of a chase and run between police and demonstrators.

Casa Branca – The Bridge

Orlando Mabasso (Maputo, Mozambique)

“Mockumentary”: conflicts in the uses and appropriation of the passage, between clothes sellers plying their trade above and below a bridge in Maputo.

Passicalme

Selim Gribaa (Tunis, Tunisia)

Fiction: unsettling trip by Asma and Mourad along Rue des Forgerons in the Médina in Tunis, the street leading to Bab Jedid (Gate of Renewal). Reflection on the passage as an architectural space, the concept of the boundary and cinema as a passage from imaginary to real