In the heart of the Camargue region, in the south of France, Jawad and Belka find freedom in their love of Camargue races. For these young Maghrebi men, the event is more than a simple tradition. Facing off with a bull is an opportunity to establish their place in the arena—and in French society. But at what cost?
Football is both the place, the crystallization of sporting passion and the witness of identity imaginations. It is also an interesting and relevant area for discussing the migration issue. From the 1930s to the present day, football, notably with the composition of the French team, has reflected the plurality of the French population. Raymond Kopa, Michel Platini, Zinedine Zidane, Basile Boli... these four footballers alone illustrate the four major waves of immigration that France has experienced.
An anti-conformist, Pedro Almodovar has dared everything in his immense cinematic career. Confronting impulses, drugs and unbridled sexuality, cross-dressing identities, over the years he has allowed a colorful, uninhibited, taboo-free post-Franco cinema to blossom. In a Spain now caught up in its past, the native of La Mancha embodies all those Spanish generations who know how important it is to remember and protect this artistic insolence at all costs.
2021 served as a revelation for the last holdouts: thanks to confinement and the “Culture Pass”, manga sales and streaming anime viewing hours have exploded. These are today the dominant cultural works among young people. In truth, the trend has already been present for at least ten years. However, not so long ago, criticisms were rife and politicians accused manga of all evils. For the first time, precursors and current generations, cartoonists and publishers, absolute fans and rappers speak about their passion for these comics from Japan.
In 1971, director Melvin Van Peebles turned the figure of the black hero in US cinema upside down with Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song: the story of the making of a seminal movie that initiated the Blaxploitation movement, a short-lived but highly influential sub-genre in the years that followed.
On August 15, 2021, Afghanistan descends into chaos. In one day, the completion of the withdrawal of Western forces precipitated the debacle of the regime in place: the army vanished, the leaders fled and the Taliban took Kabul without a fight. The great Central Asian country opens a new chapter in its tragic history, twenty years after the "war on terror" launched by George W. Bush in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. The undisputed masters of 40 million trapped Afghans, the "students of religion" are back and are savoring their revenge by posing as the United States' victors. Their program will surprise no one: to restore the Islamic emirate and set up the "true" sharia, i.e. a perfect world, with divine commandments applied to the letter as in the time of the prophet.
The Quran is the Holy Book of Islam, a religion shared by more than a billion followers worldwide. For the Muslim tradition, since its revelation to the Prophet Muhammad between the year 610 and 632 of the Christian era in Mecca and Medina, the Koran is immutable, and has remained maintained. However, recent discoveries of Koranic manuscripts analyzed by scientists, dated around the year 680 - the oldest known in the world - revealed that the Koran has a history. During the first century of Islam, and before the canonical version of the Caliph Uthman imposed itself, the holy book of Islam would have known competing versions, a different organization of the suras, variable readings due to a writing, in its beginnings, very rudimentary… It is to this meeting of knowledge, at the crossroads between the Muslim tradition and scientific research, that this journey to the origins of the Koran invites.
IAM, Soprano, the Fonky Family, Jul, and a dozen other rappers, composers and producers recount the genesis and blossoming of the rap movement in Marseilles, a leading musical attitude for more than 30 years in the making now.
