Lettr

Benedicte is a divorced woman who is greatly appreciated by those around her. One day, she finds an anonymous declaration of love on her desk. The strange letters accumulate and Benedicta is eager to discover the author. And who better to help her in this exciting investigation than her wild ten-year-old daughter?

Marion Hänsel directed this personal meditation on the joys and responsibilities of parenthood, in which a narrator reads Hansel's philosophic musings on raising her young son on her own, while carefully shot and selected footage of different cloud formations from around the world provide a striking visual backdrop. Catherine Deneuve read Hänsel's text in the original French-language version of Nuages; Charlotte Rampling did the honors for the English-language print, while Barbara Auer, Carmen Maura, and Antje De Boeck respectively lent their voices to the German, Spanish, and Dutch editions of the film.

A filmmaker’s self-portrait, asking hard questions of herself and of us. Invoking Aurore Clément as a kind of stand-in or proxy, a glamorous counterpart to Akerman who sports a drawn-on moustache. What is cinema for? Who is it for? If the Mosaic prohibition on making graven images includes film images, then where does that leave a Jewish filmmaker?

This short film is Godard’s message to the people of Lausanne, specifically journalist and critic Freddy Buache, addressing his reasons why he will not make a film about their town’s 500th anniversary. Rather than cynical or defensive, Godard's bemused narration of the footage of Lausanne is imaginative and even playful, a rumination on cinema's possibilities.

During the war of Indochina, Claire tries to maintain the link between her parents.

Taking up the concept of the ABCs of Death films, 26 French-speaking videographers will receive one of the 26 letters of the alphabet and will have, with this letter, to stage a story about fear.

In 1970, Tahar, a young Tunisian, travels to France for the first time to help his older brother, who is wrongly accused of murder and incarcerated in Paris. He first stops in Marseille, where he meets Tunisians very different from those familiar to him; enigmatic French people; and a strange atmosphere that makes him doubt his brother’s innocence, his own innocence and his own mental integrity.

"Babel / Letter to my Friends who Stayed in Belgium" narrates the day-to-day existence of a filmmaker wandering through his city (Brussels) and who has a notion to follow in the footsteps of dramatist Antonin Artaud and visit the Tarahumara people of Mexico. This is a film about intimacy and friendship. Written in the first person, it places Boris and Brussels in the center of the universe, here represented by the crazy, vertiginous, endless spiral of the biblical Tower. It is Boris's diary and self-portrait. He plays himself on screen (as do the cast of a hundred who also allowed themselves to be "Babelized")

A father and son set out on a trip to the Balmoral Art Institute. The father seeks a job for himself, but also hopes to convince the Institute’s director to offer a residency to his son, an aspiring composer. Shortly after they arrive, the father must deal with competition from a strange, hostile man as his son, revolted by the Institute, leaves. That’s when he turns to writing letters to his son to express his deepest thoughts. As the days and months go by and his time at the Institute drags on, he starts to lose his sense of identity. Federico Hidalgo’s latest opus features his usual meticulous, cryptic narrative construction and signature sublime visuals along with striking sound design.

In this very personal and poetic film, veteran documentarian Serge Giguère pores through 100 letters written by his late mother to him and his 15 siblings. In them, she details the trials and tribulations of raising 16 children in rural Quebec, while helping to run a family carpentry business. Through inventive and playful techniques, Giguère brings the stories alive, applying creative approaches to family photographs, archival footage and staged reenactments. He mixes his mother's stories with his own memories and those of his siblings, some of whom hear for the first time what their mother had to say about them. Through these intertwining stories, the film presents not only a testament of a mother's complicated love for her many children, but also offers an intimate look at 1950s working class Quebec. - Aisha Jamal (Hot Docs Film Festival)

Such diverse modes of expression as dance, music, poetic narration and images drawn directly on film combine to tell the story of a letter and the joy it carries to its destination. In French, with English sub-titles.

Ben wanders around the tourist attractions in Geneva, guided by his sister's voice. A wannabe homage to Benoît Giroux (1981-2019).

Rooms must be vacated before noon on the day of departure. An extra night will be charged for all late departures." Jean-Claude Rousseau has used this banal, well-known notice as a synopsis for his film. Taken out of context, thereby rendering it mysterious, it is an ideal introduction to this letter, which consists of two shots – the front and behind of a window in a hotel in Turin – and an insert. Here, Rousseau continues to explore "basic film techniques" but in this case, he abandons super eight to film in DV, a new technique and a new quest for harmony between visuals and sounds. Jean-Pierre Rehm.

Lettres du Voyant is a documentary-fiction about spiritism and technology in contemporary Ghana, which attempts to uncover some truths about a mysterious practice called 'Sakawa' – internet scams mixed with voodoo magic. Tracing back the scammers’ stories to the times of Ghanaian independence, the film proposes Sakawa as a form of anti-neocolonial resistance. The film takes the form of a voyage to the end of the world, travelling through a network of digitised mine shafts that lead the viewer to each of the film’s locations; a gold mine, an e-waste dump, a voodoo ritual or a discotheque for example. A character recounts a story through reading a series of letters that he has written to the film’s author – letters that speak about the colonial history of Ghana, of gold, of technology.