You All Are Captains

Director: Oliver Laxe

2010 / 78min / DCP

Born out of a filmmaking workshop that Laxe, beginning in 2007, conducted with the children of poor families in Tangier, the director’s feature debut begins by depicting just such a workshop, its teacher portrayed by Laxe himself, then lights off into uncharted terrain when his pupils, rankling at his obliviously paternalistic oversight, mutiny and make the film their own. An audaciously original, endlessly imaginative documentary-narrative hybrid with much to import concerning the complex power dynamics between the one who films and the one who is doing the filming, as well as those between Europe and its former colonial subjects. “Poses a simple question—how to make a movie that has both the symbolic grandeur of big pop entertainment and the personal importance of family pictures—and the film itself offers some heuristic, tentative, yet remarkably reverberant answers.” —Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Distributor: Zeitun Films