Sylvain George

Directing

Sylvain George

Born 1968-01-01 · Vaulx en Velin, France

Sylvain George (b. 1968) is a French writer and documentary filmmaker. A one time social worker and philosophy student, George soon turned to filmmaking, inspired by the social critic Walter Benjamin, concerned especially with immigration and contemporary politics in France.

Acting credits

Behind the camera

Paris is a Moveable Feast - A Film in 18 Waves poster
5.2

Sylvain George crosses Paris in 2015 and 2016 with an “unaccompanied foreign minor”, as the official term has it. This splendid whirlwind in black-and-white mixes the details of iconic monuments – an equestrian statue, the obelisk or the big wheel – with life in the streets.

Paris is a Moveable Feast - A Film in 18 Waves

2017

Lovely May poster
NR

This movie is a fragment of the demonstration of May 1st and social movements in the year 2016.

Lovely May

2017

No artwork available
NR

No synopsis available yet.

Un peu de feu que vole (sa geste en mille éclats)

2018

The Dark Clouds poster
NR

Still in Calais, daybreak, a raid is coming to an end. Men come out of the ground, life resumes its course. Sovereignty of certain gestures...

The Dark Clouds

2012

Obscure Night - "Ain't I a Child?" poster
8.0

After having walked the streets of Mellila, Malik, Mehdi, and Hassan now beat the cobblestones of Paris, discovering its lights and its chimeras, its joys and its violence...

Obscure Night - "Ain't I a Child?"

2025

Obscure Night - "Ain't I a Child?" poster
8.0

After having walked the streets of Mellila, Malik, Mehdi, and Hassan now beat the cobblestones of Paris, discovering its lights and its chimeras, its joys and its violence...

Obscure Night - "Ain't I a Child?"

2025

No artwork available
NR

Nonon is an orphan who left Mali and the Kaye region at the age of 14 to go to Europe, and who is today, after crossing the desert, in transit in the mountains of Morocco. We discover his terrible living conditions in the forests surrounding Nador, his daily life as well as that of sub-Saharans, the different paths they can take to get around the ban on entering the city of Nador, to escape the multiple roundups, the destruction of the camps in the mountains... Finally, we see the barrier crossed...

Sealand

The Outbursts (My Mouth, My Revolt, My Name) poster
5.5

This film is composed of fragments escaped from Qu’ils reposent en révolte (Des figures de Guerres). Fragments of voices, laughter and rage, snatches of words, images and memory, the words near and far; the breathe of the wind, the gesture of the sun at the sunset, the reflections red-blood; the raids of the police, processions, warriors, court of injustice ... For a map of the violence inflicted on migrants, the repetition of the colonial movement, and the unacceptability of the “world as it is”.

The Outbursts (My Mouth, My Revolt, My Name)

2012

No artwork available
5.1

This film is a newsreel, which presents some views, scenes and mo-ments of the class struggle in Madrid. The “Movimiento 15-M” is the first major “movement” in the beginning of the 21st century. A deep movement, trans-border and trans-historical which reactivates and works ideas and concepts that were long thought to be forgotten: demos, logos, revolution ...

Vers Madrid! (The Burning Bright)

2012

L'impossible - Pages arrachées poster
NR

Situated in the vein of Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Dostoievski and Benjamin and of free jazz and punk, this film bears witness to the iniquitous policies that shape our era, the “infernal” nature of certain political lives or black bodies (those of immigrants, emigrants, workers, the unemployed, students...). It operates, as a minority film, in a critical stasis of mythical and mainstream realities, and deals with the issue of revolt and insurrection: excesses, disidentification, unclear reconfiguration... We are presented, through a dialectical reversal, "non-places" that cannot be assimilated, utopias, corps-impossibles

L'impossible - Pages arrachées

2012

Youssef, The Wind, The Fury, Before Existence poster
NR

A young man shouts at the sea. Shot near Calais.

Youssef, The Wind, The Fury, Before Existence

2017

Obscure Night - Wild Leaves (The Burning Ones, the Obstinate) poster
NR

Melilla, a Spanish enclave in Morocco, is a land border between the African continent and Europe. A buffer zone where European migration policies, their challenges and their consequences are read and shown. A place towards which converge the migrants of the Maghreb. They are "those who burn". They have nothing else to lose except wanting to live to the end.

Obscure Night - Wild Leaves (The Burning Ones, the Obstinate)

2022

They Will Kill Us All poster
NR

In the dark night, near the port of Calais, of a raid against migrants. In the dark, of a political night...

They Will Kill Us All

2015

No Border (Aspettavo Che Scendesse La Sera) poster
6.0

Paris, an open city. Commemorations abound: ruins, winds, tides. Young Iraqi, Afghan or Iranian immigrants wandering the streets, between soup kitchens and improvised campsites. People who, by leaving their lands, plunge public order and bourgeois society into crisis. An emancipation movement becomes deeply melancholic, elegiac: redefining the notion of revolution for a new notion of History.

No Border (Aspettavo Che Scendesse La Sera)

2008

Un Homme idéal - Fragment K poster
NR

A man walks through the city of Paris. Mr. K. Just like the 30,000 families who place their last hope in S.'s circular, Mr. K. waits... and while he waits, we discover the pitiful face of French society at war...

Un Homme idéal - Fragment K

2008

Obscure Night - Goodbye Here, Anywhere poster
5.5

Melilla, a Spanish enclave in Morocco, is a land border between the African continent and Europe. In transit through the city, Malik and his friends, miners of Moroccan origin, try to reach Europe by any means necessary. Day after night, they are up to no good, running the city in all directions, turning it upside down like a glove, like seismographs revealing the most burning present like the movements of the most distant past, taking all the risks to cross the barriers, to cross the waters of the port, climbing on the boats… Stay there, as if dead before being born? Rather "burn the sea" than die before having lived.

Obscure Night - Goodbye Here, Anywhere

2023

Obscure Night - Goodbye Here, Anywhere poster
5.5

Melilla, a Spanish enclave in Morocco, is a land border between the African continent and Europe. In transit through the city, Malik and his friends, miners of Moroccan origin, try to reach Europe by any means necessary. Day after night, they are up to no good, running the city in all directions, turning it upside down like a glove, like seismographs revealing the most burning present like the movements of the most distant past, taking all the risks to cross the barriers, to cross the waters of the port, climbing on the boats… Stay there, as if dead before being born? Rather "burn the sea" than die before having lived.

Obscure Night - Goodbye Here, Anywhere

2023

May They Rest in Revolt (Figures of War) poster
7.5

Ode, in black and white, to immigrants, from Calais, from elsewhere.

May They Rest in Revolt (Figures of War)

2011

N'entre pas sans violence dans la nuit poster
7.0

Paris, October 2005: Inhabitants and undocumented people spontaneously protest against police raids and arrests in the Chateau d'Eau district.

N'entre pas sans violence dans la nuit

2007

Nocturne White - Hunter poster
6.0

In the dark night, near the docks of Calais, a young man recounts his journey, before the police come to interrupt him and make arrests... Description, in the dark, of a political night. Definition, in the dark, of a new "color", the white-hunter.

Nocturne White - Hunter

2015