Doha Film Institute
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“One day, I broke my watch into small pieces to stop a militiaman from tearing it off me. I gave up my life; that's how they failed to take it”. Today, Fida decides to meet those fighters who frightened her as a child.
“In my country, they call me “The Cat”, because like cat I died seven times, and seven times I came back to life”. The film opens on a tale with animated figurines in miniature settings reconstructing Fida’s childhood during the war. It then shifts to a documentary style with a series of real confrontations between Fida and ex-militiamen manipulating the small figurines. The miniature material becomes a bridge between different subjective stories, infusing the collective history with individual details. The experience of this confrontational space turns out to be cathartic. The narrative moves around between realities and temporalities, proceeding from Fida’s childhood in the eye of the storm during the war in the eighties until today.

Credits

Director
Sylvie Ballyot
Screenwriter
Fida Bizri and Sylvie Ballyot
Producer
Céline Loiseau
Co-Producer
Luc Camilli, Jean-Laurent Csinidi

About the Director

Sylvie Ballyot
Having graduated from the Femis school in Paris, France, Sylvie Ballyot directed several shorts and medium-length fiction films that explore love and family relationships: ‘Alice’ (2002), ‘Tel Père telle fille’ (2007, selected at the Directors’ Fortnight, Cannes), and ‘Moi tout seul’ (2012). ‘Love and Words’ (2008), shot in Yemen, was a creative documentary that met with great success and was awar