Thierry Michel

Luis Carlos, also called “The Rat”, and Luciano de Souca, “The Chi­na­man”, are gang mem­bers who were aban­doned as chil­dren onto the streets of Rio. These two Car­i­o­cas teenagers have … read more

Teheran, Decem­ber 1998. The burial of the mur­dered oppo­si­tion poet, Mohammed Mokhtari, one of the key fig­ures in the fight against the sup­pres­sion of free speech in Iran, begins the cin­e­mat­ic jour­ney through the Repub­lic of Islam.

“I came to Teheran in the hopes of under­stand­ing the mean­ing of a rev­o­lu­tion and its ideals. I wanted to immerse myself in the daily life of a soci­ety which is con­sid­ered to be the cradle of Islam­ic fun­da­men­tal­ism. In order to find out more about one of the last great rev­o­lu­tions, I went to the archives and dis­cov­ered the sombre, haunt­ing images of Rehza Pahle­vis self-appoint­ment as Shah, the Islam­ic rev­o­lu­tion, and the return of the Aya­tol­lah Khome­i­ni in 1979.” 

What is it that remains from this Rev­o­lu­tion? Twenty three years after the advent of the Islam­ic Rev­o­lu­tion, this coun­try, which has once again fallen prey to the coun­try’s tur­bu­lent his­to­ry, is on the road to moder­ni­ty. Faced with rad­i­cal Islam, advo­cat­ed by the reli­gious ortho­doxy, the Iran­ian youth look increas­ing­ly towards the West and expos­es itself to the winds of glob­al­i­sa­tion. . No longer do the young people of Iran iden­ti­fy with the reli­gious rev­o­lu­tion as strong­ly as the older gen­er­a­tions of the past once did. 

This is Zaire, after 30 years of inde­pen­dence and 25 years of Mobutu’s rule. What does the future hold in store for this coun­try? Thier­ry Michel filmed the cap­i­tal Kin­shasa … read more