Films by Juan Sarmiento G.

Brasil, France, Germany 2021, 99 min
by Karim Aïnouz

Algerien par accident flirts between the fiction and the documentary, even the auto-fiction. Karim Aïnouz, the Brazilian director, by using his personal background, invites the audience to follow/discover an incredible journey through space and time, with an original and usually unknown prism/aspect: The strong bound between Algeria and Brazil, two countries with political and revolutionary strikes that moulded their evolution.With the support of: ANCINE, ARTE FRANCE - LA LUCARNE, CNC, PROCIREP ANGOA, SANAD, Robert Bosch Stiftung and the Literary Colloquium as part of the Grenzgänger funding programme, Fundação Paradiso

2020, 80 min
by Karim Aïnouz

Algeria, February 2019. A popular pacifist uprising erupts against the candidacy of president Bouteflika for a 5th term, steadily swelling into a revolution. Nardjes, a young Algerian woman, takes part in the movement to convey the hope of her people. Shot on the 8th of March 2019, International Women's Day, the film draws a portrait of her as she joins thousands of protesters in the streets of Algiers, fighting to overthrow a regime that has silenced them for decades. We follow her, while her whole country could be marching towards a brighter future.

Germany, France, Brasil 2018, 97 min
by Karim Aïnouz

Berlin's historic defunct Tempelhof Airport remains a place of arrivals and departures. Today its massive hangars are used as Germany's largest emergency shelter for asylum seekers, like 18-year-old Syrian refugee Ibrahim. As Ibrahim adjusts to his transitory daily life of social services interviews, German lessons and medical exams, he tries to cope with homesickness and the anxiety of whether or not he will gain residency or be deported. (LUXBOX)A documentary about Berlin‘s former airport Tempelhof, opened in 1923 as one of the world‘s biggest building complexes in the 3rd Reich. Since then more than 30 million arrivals and departures have been counted. It was closed 10 years ago. But up until now it remains a place of departures an arrivals.A film about those Berliners who come here to escape from their daily lives and those refugees who came here to finally arrive somewhere. (LupaFilm)

Germany 2017, 97 min
by Jakob Preuss

Paul has made his way from his home in Cameroon across the Sahara to the Moroccan coast where he now lives in a forest waiting for the right moment to cross the Mediterranean. This is where he meets Jakob, a filmmaker from Berlin, who is filming along Europe's borders. Soon afterwards, Paul manages to cross over to Spain on a rubber boat. He survives - but half of his companions die on this tragic 50 hour odyssey. Held for two months in a deportation centre, upon his release Paul meets Jakob again at a shelter for migrants in Southern Spain. When Paul decides to continue on to Germany, Jakob has to make a choice: will he become an active part of Paul's pursuit of a better life or remain a detached documentary filmmaker?

Germany 2010, 77 min
by Juan Sarmiento G.

"The Land Left Behind" tells of the fate that befalls three people who have ended up in the Moloch that is the Colombian city of Bogotá. On a daily basis, Solangel, Ruben and Teodoro walk about through the chaos of dirt, noise and crowds. There’s always a challenge: they have to find money, food and work for themselves and their families to survive. A few months back they had a small piece of land, work and family and friendsaround them. As a result of brutal violence and threats, they were forced to leave their home. The yearning for the countryside, and the desire to return there, is something that the three fundamentally have in common. Like daydreams, images of vast landscapes appear to them time and again in their daily lives: vast rivers, green forests, the endless sky and the sea. The peace and freedom of the countryside is in great contrast to life in the loud and oppressive city in which Solangel, Ruben and Teodoro must live at the moment.