Trica Keaton, professor and interdisciplinary researcher, 2024-2025 FIAS FP x Iméra fellow, is organising her end-of-residency event on June 3rd, 2025 at the Gyptis Cinema in Marseille.
An evening of powerful cinema, urgent voices, and stories that must be heard!
The Gyptis is hosting a meeting-session during which the film Bâtiment 5 by Ladj Ly will be screened. The viewing will be followed by a live discussion with director Ladj Ly, filmmakers Gael Barboza and Julio Iborra, and Marie Antonelle Joubert, director of the Kourtrajmé Marseille School. It will be moderated by Rokhaya Diallo (journalist) and Trica Keaton (researcher).
The session will be preceded by a screening of Gael Barboza’s F**K La Sororité and a 20-minute excerpt from Julio Iborra’s Mikrobe.
This session will be completely free and open to all.
Programme
F**K La Sororité (11 min 55 sec) by Gael Barboza (African Dream Productions – coproduced with Kourtrajmé Marseille).
The only French film selected for the prestigious HBO Urbanworld festival in New-York in 2024.
Synopsis: Cécile and Meggy, two actresses, audition for the same role: that of a “woman of colour”. With few offers for their profiles, will they support each other? Or will they say: “F**K THE SORORITY”?
Mikrobe (20 min extract) by Julio Iborra (Drive by Productions).
Synopsis: 7-year-old “Mikrobe” lives alone with his young mother in the backstreets of downtown Marseille, and decides to run away to board a luxury cruise ship that’s due to circumnavigate the world. In his mad search for the boat, he encounters several people who will change his life forever.
Bâtiment 5 (1 h 45 min) by Ladj Ly (SRAB Films, Lyly Films, France 2 Cinéma).
Synopsis: Haby, a young woman deeply involved in the life of her community, discovers the new redevelopment plan for the area where she grew up. Conducted on the sly by Pierre Forges, a young pediatrician who has been promoted to mayor, the plan calls for the demolition of the building where Haby grew up. Haby and her family set out to prevent the demolition of Building 5 by fighting the municipality and its grand ambitions.
Acknowledgments
This event was organised by:
- Trica Keaton (African and African American Studies, Dartmouth College/Iméra) ;
- Marie-Pierre Ulloa (Stanford University/Iméra) ;
- Marie Larose (French Department, Dartmouth College) ;
- Lucas Hollister (French Department, Dartmouth College) ;
- Yasser Elhariry (French Department, Dartmouth College) ;
- In partnership with La Friche la Belle de Mai.
With generous support from the Department of African and African American Studies of Dartmouth College, from the Leslie Center for the Humanities, from the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life, from the Office of the Associate Dean of International and Interdisciplinary Studies at Dartmouth, Department of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth, Department of French and Italian at Dartmouth, from Iméra – the Institute for Advanced Study of Aix Marseille Université, from the FIAS fellowship Programme of the RFIEA network, supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement n°945408, and Émile Abinal.
Thanks to Laila Tahhar (producer, Lyly Films), Eugénie Sonder (Lyly Films), Alban Corbier-Labasse, (CEO, La Friche la Belle de Mai), Juliette Grimont, (programming manager at Cinéma Le Gyptis/La Friche la Belle de Mai), Nicolás Roman Borre, (project manager, Cinéma Le Gyptis/La Friche la Belle de Mai), Roger Arnold (AAAS, Dartmouth), Dennis Grady (Dartmouth), Muhammet Pakdi (Dartmouth), as well as the scientific and administrative teams and the 2024-2025 residents of Iméra.
Ladj Ly, a native of Montfermeil (Seine-Saint-Denis), began his career with the Kourtrajmé collective, founded in 1995 by his childhood friends Kim Chapiron and Romain Gavras. He was first introduced to cinema as an actor, then as a director with his first short film MONTFERMEIL LES BOSQUETS in 1997. At the same time, he has long been a making-of director. In 2004, he co-wrote the documentary 28 MILLIMÈTRES with photographer JR, which features large-format portraits on the walls of Clichy, Montfermeil and Paris.
After the 2005 riots triggered by the deaths of two youths, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, in an electrical transformer in Clichy-sous-Bois, Ladj Ly decided to film his neighborhood for a year, and in 2007 made a documentary called 365 JOURS À CLICHY-MONTFERMEIL.
In 2014, he continued his work as a documentary filmmaker, making 365 JOURS AU MALI, a testimony to a region in turmoil, where militias and Touaregs are preparing for war.
In 2017, he directed his short film LES MISÉRABLES, nominated for a 2018 César and awarded at the Clermont-Ferrand festival. The same year, he co-directs the documentary À VOIX HAUTE with Stéphane de Freitas, also nominated for a César.
In 2019, he presents his first feature LES MISÉRABLES, selected in Competition at the Cannes Film Festival. The film wins the Prix du Jury and 4 Césars (César du Public, Best Film, Best Emerging Actor, Best Editing), and receives an Oscar nomination for Best International Film in 2020.
Ladj Ly returns in 2023 with BATIMENT 5, premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival.
He is now working on his third feature, a historical film centered on Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, father of the writer Alexandre Dumas, starring Omar Sy, Vincent Cassel, François Civil and Théo Christine.
Rokhaya Diallo is an award-winning French journalist, author and filmmaker, recognized for her work in the field of human rights. She is a columnist for the Washington Post and the Guardian, and a researcher at the Gender+Justice Initiative Research Center at Georgetown University (Washington).
Rokhaya Diallo is the author of a dozen books and comic strips, and has made several documentaries. With Grace Ly, she also created “Kiffe Ta Race”, the first French-language podcast dedicated to racial issues and ranked as one of the best podcasts by Apple. In 2022, Rokhaya Diallo founded W.O.R.D., the first school dedicated to public speaking, with the aim of democratizing access to the public sphere.
Originally from Brazil and now living in Valencia, Gael Barboza is a graduate of the Kourtrajmé Marseille school in 2021. As a writer-director, his first short fiction film, F**K La Sororité, was the only French film selected for the prestigious HBO Urbanworld festival in New York in 2024. His second short film, Tchip, a 16-minute sequence shot in the chaos of a film shoot, was supported by the CNC in France’s Région and is about to begin its festival run this summer. He was scriptwriter, director and actor on this project. He is currently developing his first feature film as a screenwriter, produced by The Film. He has been a member of the Netflix Grow Creative network since 2021 and has also published several collections of poetry and 2 novels, notably on the issue of being Black in France.
Born in Marseille in 1998, Julio Iborra took his first steps directing rap videos for local artists, before founding Drive By in 2017 to produce his own projects. Through his films, he captures the raw soul of Marseille’s northern neighborhoods, blending social realism, poetry and fantasy. With a sincere and daring eye, Julio aims to offer powerful narratives that question contemporary society.
Trained in the social sciences, Marie Antonelle Joubert has been co-founder and director of the Kourtrajmé Marseille school since 2020. Native of Provence, she has worked for associations in France, the Middle East and Latin America on democracy and human rights issues for 25 years. At the same time, she worked as a fixer, then as a production manager for numerous reports and documentaries in France and abroad. She was then production director of Kourtrajmé Productions alongside Ladj Ly, Toumani Sangaré and Nicolas Le Phat Tan, and then of Productions des Vendredis with Ladj Ly and Saïd Belktibia: productions that tried to promote representativeness in French audiovisual… without much success!
