Content from ISKRA

A series of 43 documentary shorts, directed (without credit) by several famous French filmmakers and each running between two and four minutes. Each "tract" espouses a leftist political viewpoint through the filmed depiction of real-life events, including workers' strikes and the events of Paris in May '68.

In May 1968, workers, students and young people rise up against the morality and power of the establishment. Faculties and factories are under occupation. Barricades are erected. Paving slabs are launched. Words give way to actions. This is the confrontation. These images bear witness to the men and women who, in their indignancy, march towards their revolution. 50 years ago, as part of our ARC collective, we filmed the uprising of May and June 1968. Out of this material and scenes borrowed from our other filmmaker friends, we created this film.

The violent break-up of former Yugoslavia is described from the Serbian point of view, using the story of ethnically mixed couple in war-torn city of Vukovar as metaphor.

In 1923 the scientist Von Dracula invented Vampisol, a drink that allowed vampires to live in the sun. La Capa Nostra and the European Vampire Group confront each other in Havana to control the Vampisol, but Pepe, Von Dracula's nephew, sang the Vampisol formula for free on Radio Vampiro Internacional. Now Pepe must face the Nazi vampires, who use the most powerful Vampisol: El Vampiyaba.

Chris Marker’s A Grin Without a Cat is an epic political essay tracing the rise and decline of the global left from the 1960s to the 1970s. Through archival footage and commentary, the film examines revolutionary movements in France, Latin America, and beyond, reflecting on the ideals, failures, and fading hopes of a generation.

Composed entirely of still photographs taken by Chris Marker across 26 countries, If I Had Four Dromedaries presents a dialogue between three voices reflecting on the meaning of images and travel. Through this photo-essay form, Marker explores the relationship between still and moving images and the act of seeing itself.

On May 21, 1975, the trial of the members of the Red Army Faction (also known as the Baader-Meinstein Gang) began. Four members appeared before the Stuttgart court to answer for the attacks that had been raging for five years in the young Federal Republic of Germany. The documentary, whose title is borrowed from Berthold Brecht's In Praise of Dialectics, recounts the conditions of the trials and detention of the Baader-Meinstein Gang members and the disqualification of Klaus Croissant as their lawyer.

A documentary look at striking workers in a textile plant in Besançon, France, centering on interviews with workers about their motivations for becoming involved with the union and the struggles of their day to day life.

Recounts Ireland's history from British colonization to the territory's division in 1922, then from 1968 details a decade of events through images and eyewitness accounts of killings and such massacres as the infamous "Bloody Sunday" as the IRA argues their cause.

Pauline, Norah, Kristina and others wait for hours, sitting under a hut deep in the Bois de Vincennes. In front of the administrative detention center (CRA) in Paris, they have all come to see their loved ones locked up. Lives on hold, awaiting deportation or release. On this stage, these women tell their stories, talk to each other, share their experience, their revolt and their dreams with new visitors. They are the mirror of migrant detention, its reverse view.

In the 1968 movement in Paris, Jean-Luc Godard made a 16mm, 3-minute long film, Film-tract No.1968, Le Rouge, in collaboration with French artist Gérard Fromanger. Starting with the shot identifying its title written in red paint on the Le Monde for 31 July 1968, the film shows the process of making Fromanger’s poster image, which is thick red paint flows over a tri-color French flag. —Hye Young Min

The mother and housewife of our time becomes involved in the Flag War.

Young French immigrants to Sochaux dismantle the mechanism of exploitation in their daily lives as it was thought by Peugeot. They play and tell about the recruitment, hiring, scheduling, housing, and struggle that has been done in the ALTM - Homes for Young Workers.

Marta and Karina are sex workers also studying to become lawyers. Filmed over ten years, this documentary captures their unlikely journey from prostitution to the defense of women's rights.

Paris, Latin Quarter. A small cinema that is both famous and marginal, Action Christine. The cashier has taken her camcorder and takes us to this public place, her workplace. Place of life, of passage, of meeting, a window open on the street, behind the hygienic phone, it is the daily life of the cashiers and the openers punctuated by the alternation of surging entrances and idle intersession.