The American killed by an indigenous tribe in 2018, the art dealer ruined on the stock market... the crazy stories of the Fipadoc of Biarritz

The Somali boss had finally accepted.

Yes, a documentary about him could be useful for his reputation, which had to be cleared at all costs.

In reality, behind the American producers interested in his life hid the Belgian police.

On arrival at Brussels airport, a welcoming committee was waiting for Mohamed Abdi Hassan, known as “Grande Gueule”.

Without camera but with handcuffs.

In the end, it received little media coverage in 2013, and this story was the subject of one of the best documentaries, this one very real, by

in Biarritz.

, a Belgian production which did not leave French broadcasters indifferent, boxing in the “international documentary” category.

The winners will be unveiled on Saturday January 28 with a Bruce Toussaint already experienced in the animation.

The journalist will not be afraid, it seems, to push the ditty.

An arrow in the middle of the Bible

The festival, which receives two thousand films each year and selects less than a tenth, aims at both eclecticism and the singular.

, summarizes the president of the event Anne Georget, herself a documentary filmmaker.

This is how Camille Le Pomellec chose the subject of her documentary

, which will be broadcast on France 2:

the least common way.

This young man was killed in 2018 by one of the most isolated tribes in the world: the Sentinels, who live on an island in the Indian Ocean a few miles from civilization.

Fed up with evangelism, he had gone there illegally to bring them the Christian faith.

, assures director Camille Le Pomellec.

Of these hunter-gatherers, we know that they were mistreated by the colonizers and that they come from peoples who came from Africa 70,000 years ago.

But not much more.

Seeing them - Indian anthropologists have managed to film them - gives a dizzying feeling of anachronism, as if we could come across our own past.

Good leads from publishers

Noah Cohen, he delved into the past of his father Michel Cohen, a lover of painting who loved the stock market even more.

This art dealer is wanted by the United States, where he left tens of millions of dollars in debt.

His trajectory, which passes through a Brazilian prison and the Parisian suburbs, where he lives today, would make Netflix salivate.

To tell it in

, his son opted for a short film format, which unfortunately we rarely see on our screens.

," notes Anne Georget.

This duration, which varies between five and forty minutes, also makes it possible to take an interest in sometimes more minimalist subjects.

And poetic.

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Where to find, when it is not in our own life, good stories?

In the books, of course.

A “speed dating” session, so to speak, was organized at Fipadoc with the ocean in the background.

Publishers present their works to producers who are keen on adapting novelties.

For example, the biography of Mandel Szkolnikoff, the collabo smuggler who owned half of Monaco.

Or that of Marie-Thérèse Walter, Picasso's discreet muse.

Image professionals listen attentively.

And question.

Does the author still have access to the archives?

Is such an essential witness still alive?

Do we have television images?

, provides an Alsatian production assistant.

And fund them.

The cost of making an hour of film continues to climb.

It has gone, in ten years, from 150,000 to 200,000 euros approximately.

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In cinemas, the authors of the projected documentaries observe the faces of the spectators.

And sometimes embrace at the time of the end credits, relieved.

Their creation finally begins to live.

Will it be sacred on Saturday?

The festival-goers, too, discuss it in the surrounding cafés, where they draw up their viewing program with the care of an apothecary.

At first pensive over her chipirons (cooked a la plancha, garlic and Espelette pepper), our neighbor indulges in confidences and recounts her youth.

The story of a love that began in a village in the Basque Country, continued on the other side of the Mediterranean between the orange trees of Algiers and was interrupted by the war.

Good stories are definitely everywhere.