L’Œil d’or 2024 – Raoul Peck and Nada Riyadh & Ayman El Amir

A film that follows the journey of a young South African photographer during the apartheid era. In 1967, at the age of 27, Ernest Cole published a book on the horrors of his country’s regime, the publication of which forced him into exile in the United States and Europe, never to return to his native country. Based on a few testimonies, but even more on the artist’s own words and the extraordinary photographic work recently rediscovered in a Swedish bank, the director tells the story of the wanderings of this fragile, rebellious artist, the loneliness and despair that slowly consumed him to the point where he gradually gave up photography. This tragic destiny, using Ernest Cole’s own words and pictures, deeply moved us.

The Jury

The second takes us to a Coptic village in southern Egypt, in the footsteps of a small group of girls who rebel by forming a street theater troupe. Dreaming of becoming actresses, dancers or singers, they try to find their place, defying their families and the patriarchal traditions of their country. A film both simple and luminous, that could almost look like « a walk in the park », but instead shows us the complexity of their struggle to conquer freedom, and the turbulences generated around them.

The Jury