Fascinating facts at Discovery Zone festival

(CS) The Luxembourg City film festival is not only a chance to catch up with the latest fiction features, fresh from the international festival circuit, but also to learn more about the world we live in with a selection of documentary films to choose from.

French filmmaker Michel Gondry will be in Luxembourg to present his animated documentary Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? The film features interviews with US philosopher and author Noam Chomsky. Gondry, most well-known for films such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, uses animation to illustrate the thoughts of the cognitive scientist.

The result should be as entertaining as informative. While a presentation of the film by Gondry himself on February 28 is already fully booked, a second screening is available on March 4.

Also in the line-up is Web Junkie – a film about internet addiction and how China, the first country to officially recognise internet addiction as a disease, tries to tackle the problem. The film follows three young people from China as they undergo therapy at a rehabilitation centre in Beijing.

In Happily Ever After, Croatian filmmaker Tatjana Božić revisits her past relationships in order to find out where she went wrong and hopefully learn something for the future, so she can make things work out with the father of her child.

Somewhat more quirky is the idea behind Manakamana. Filmmakers Stéphanie Spray and Pacho Velez installed a camera in a cable car in the Nepalese jungle, carrying pilgrims to Manakamana temple.

As the cable car travels back and forth, the audience is given a snapshot into their daily lives, and conversations, but also tourists who travel to the temple become part of the project.

The fifth film in the programme is award-winning documentary The Crash Reel about rival snowboarding legends Kevin Pearce and Shaun White, both nearing the pinnacle of their careers, when Pearce suffers severe spinal injuries in a crash.

The films follows Pearce as he struggles to get back on his feet and, ultimately, back on the board.

Things get dark and twisted with Belgian documentary “Ne Me Quitte Pas”, which shows life in a small town in Wallonia, where two men have nothing left to live for. They have already chosen how to commit suicide when, on a forest walk, they discover the tree they wanted to hang themselves from has been cut down.

The final documentary to be screened is Let the Fire Burn, a film about 1980s Philadelphia, where streets were turned into a civil war zone, as police and black libertarian group MOVE clashed in violent conflict. Let the Fire Burn uses archival material to explore how the crisis escalated – a history lesson that explores the relationship between the individual and politics.

All films in the documentary selection are screened twice throughout the festival. All films, except “Ne Me Quitte Pas” are screened in English or with English subtitles. “Ne Me Quitte Pas” is in both French and Flemish.

The best documentary in the line-up will be awarded with a prize from a specialist jury, including film professionals and academics from a variety of film schools in Europe.

For the full programme visit discoveryzone.lu