I am Golden Karen

“Even when I close my eyes, I can hardly remem­ber what my vil­lage looks like, but I carry the beauty of Karen state in my mind for­ev­er.” Some say the fight of the Karen people against the Myan­mar gov­ern­ment is the oldest ongo­ing war of our time. One of its results is the over 400,000 Karen refugees many of whom have fled to the neigh­bour­ing coun­try of Thai­land, where they live as second class cit­i­zens, strug­gling for proper doc­u­ments. I AM GOLDEN KAREN tells the story of Thaawa, a young rapper who is part of a gen­er­a­tion of Karen who have spent a great part of their lives in Thai­land but who long to return home to their moth­er­land, Karen state, in south­ern Myan­mar. We follow Thaawa as he nego­ti­ates his iden­ti­ty as a young migrant arriv­ing in Bangkok to becom­ing a father who ques­tions his respon­si­bil­i­ties towards his family and the Karen people.

Faire-Part

On the eve of the post­poned Con­golese elec­tions, two Con­golese and two Bel­gian cineasts are col­lab­o­rat­ing on a film about Kin­shasa and its resis­tance against the lega­cies of colo­nial­ism. The four film­mak­ers want to tell a story togeth­er, but because they have grown up on oppo­site sides of his­to­ry, they have dif­fer­ent views about how to tell that story. How should it look like? Who should be in it? Who are they making it for?
FAIRE-PART is the story of these four film­mak­ers’ search for an ade­quate way to por­tray the city. By focus­ing on film­ing artis­tic-polit­i­cal per­for­mances in public spaces, they paint a provoca­tive pic­ture of Kin­shasa and its rela­tions with the rest of the world.

Fatwa

Brahim Nad­hour, a Tunisian who has been living in France since he and his wife sep­a­rat­ed, returns to Tunis to bury his son, Marouane, who died in a motor­cy­cle acci­dent. He dis­cov­ers that the young man had been active in a rad­i­cal Islamist group and decides to find the rea­sons for his rad­i­cal­iza­tion and to iden­ti­fy the people who indoc­tri­nat­ed him. In the course of his inves­ti­ga­tion, he begins to doubt the cir­cum­stances of his son’s death.
Brahim’s mis­sion reveals a glimpse of Tunisian soci­ety today. In the neigh­bor­hood where he used to live, he meets many lib­er­al-minded people who are nonethe­less very care­ful when they answer his ques­tions, out of fear of per­se­cu­tion. His ex-wife, a sec­u­lar intel­lec­tu­al and esteemed author, lives in fear of attacks during public appear­ances. The film clev­er­ly plays with the form of the detec­tive story and was pro­duced with a high level of authen­tic­i­ty and many ama­teur actors, cre­at­ing a sim­i­lar feel­ing as the films by the Dar­d­enne broth­ers, who also co-pro­duced it.