Gagnon’s previous works, –that we presented in retrospective at Play-Doc’s last edition–, demonstrated how conspiracy theories are blossoming in a post-truth climate and how deceiving others becomes a challenge, a game, and ultimately a habit. In this new project, Gagnon explores the democratizing effect of the internet, the resultant decline in deference to experts, the tendency of social media to lock us in echo chambers and the blurring of fact and fiction. This leading us all to this : on the Internet everything is true. Going South follows the highly controversial film Of the North and It is the second film of a tetralogy that explores the four cardinal directions on the internet.

Fated to live in a radical state of isolation in the paradise lost called Nueva Germania, the two surviving descendants of the Aryan colony founded by Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister in the Paraguayan jungle have their ultimate destiny revealed to them through a spontaneous breakdown of the fossilized order of their daily existence. It is as if the dark forces of time, the gods of the air and of the elements were calling for the end of the men who dreamt of a world with one history, one language, one deity, one race and one territory. LAMALAND was made in Nueva Germania, Paraguay, with Friedrich and Max Josef Schweikhart, direct survivors of the Utopian community imagined by Richard Wagner and established in the south of the Amazonia at the end of the 19th century by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Due to her unwavering “South American stubbornness,” her brother Friedrich called her –with a sarcastic affection, perhaps– “Llama.”

Catalunya, South-Eastern Pyrenees. The elements and a mineral landscape. Along the “Lister Route”, in February 1939 the refugees of the Spanish Civil War advance slowly. Among them, three antifascists militiamen. Just one year later another group of “unwanted” embarks the same route through the Pyrenees but this time in the opposite direction. It is the population of anti-fascists, foreigners and Jews fleeing from occupied and “Collaborationist” France. The philosopher Walter Benjamin is one of them.

Terra Franca (Ashore) portrays the life of a singular fisherman named Albertino Lobo, in Vila Franca de Xira, an ancient riverfront community near Lisbon. Divided between the quiet solitude of the river and the family ties that wash him ashore, the film documents the life of Albertino and his family during one year, marked by the upcoming marriage of his eldest daughter. With profound intimacy and respectful distance, Leonor Teles captures the end of a life cycle and the beginning of a new one in this beautiful and moving first feature.

Lies. Truth. Alternative Facts. The film analyses the uncovering of former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim’s wartime past by the World Jewish Congress. Created entirely with Beckermann’s own footage archive and international TV-material, the film shows the successful use of anti-Semitism and propaganda and how easily emotions can be stirred up against others and used by populist politicians. The Waldheim Waltz sets the Waldheim affair in a bigger international political context, yet 30 years on, it is dauntingly timely.