Reparations and care buttress this year's Festival under the matronage of UWM Honorary Professor and Minister of Justice (France, 2012-2016) Christiane Taubira. In the opening double bill, a conversation emerges between the 'disquiet' of the long-banned film Les statues meurent aussi and one of the royal treasures who speaks out in Dahomey as they are transported from Paris, France to be restituted in Cotonou, Benin. Where Guinean Souleymane seeks asylum (L'histoire de Souleymane) in Paris peddling to Uber's racket, Aleksei, who's fled Belarus and joined the Foreign Legion, encounters in the Niger Delta, Jomo (Disco Boy) who dreams of Paris' nightclubs as he fights the oil companies' environmental destruction, like the stop-motion puppets in Sauvages who attempt to protect Borneo's forests from the logging companies. Enslaved Massamba and Mati flee the dehumanizing 18th century plantocracy to resist as maroons on the Ile de France (Ni chaînes ni maîtres) and JR repairs by intrusion in Tehachapi, having the men be more than mug shots in the California maximum security prison whose walls melt away with the digital media's potency and in trompe l'oeil fashion. Whereas L'inhumaine breaks out of cinematography's form as a 1924 manifesto for art deco, Bolero takes liberties with the biopic to detail a sensorial portrait of Ravel's capture of modern life's frenzied measure, and the personal documentaries - Lumumba, la mort d'un prophete, the animated Parfum d'Irak, and the hybrid Filles d'Olfa - engage with the genre to narrativize the intimate interdependence of familial ecologies with their fraught socio-political landscapes. Care for the person comes through in Notre corps and Sur l'Adamant and interrelates with environmental health concerns in the dystopian fiction Le regne animal, and transhumance in Bergers, a film adaptation of Quebecois Mathyas Lefebure's autobiography. Join us for 9 days of thought-provoking films, and travel far and across time as eyewitnesses to acts of engagement, restitution, resistance, repair and care.