EXCLUSIVE: International sales and distribution agency Lightdox has acquired Giuseppe Schillaci’s documentary Auber 89 ahead of its world premiere at the Giornate degli Autori‘s Notti Veneziane (Venetian Nights), a sidebar of the Venice Film Festival.
The nonfiction feature examines the experience of Fatsah Bouyahmed, a French Algerian actor who suffered memory loss after an accident. When the filmmaker discovered archival footage of Bouyahmed from his childhood and youth in the Aubervilliers social housing estate outside Paris, he invited him to view it and that triggered a process of reconnecting Bouyahmed with his past.
“As Fatsah revisits the footage forty years later, memories of family, friendship, music, and daily life resurface alongside the social tensions of the time: rising racism, inequality, and exclusion,” notes a synopsis. “Moving between past and present, Auber 89 revisits a fleeting moment of hope before disillusionment reshaped the Parisian suburbs, while the textures of television and VHS ground the story in the sensory world of the 1980s.”
‘Auber 89.’
Courtesy of Lightdox
Auber 89 premieres September 10 at Giornate degli Autori, where it will be followed by a Q&A.
“Auber 89 is a rare kind of film, where one man’s fractured memory becomes a way into the buried history of an entire community,” said Lightdox founder Anna Berthollet. “Giuseppe Schillaci takes a remarkable archival discovery and turns it into something urgent and deeply human, carried by Fatsah Bouyahmed’s extraordinary journey back to himself. This is a film that gives the French suburbs their complexity back, beyond the clichés that have long defined them.”
‘Auber 89.’
Courtesy of Lightdox
Auber 89 is produced by Label Vidéo (Véronique Holley and Raffaele Ventura) in France, in co-production with Revolver (Paolo Maria Spina) in Italy, Via93 (Sylvain Poubelle and Bruno. Niepceron), and E2P (Pierre-Jean Bartheye) in France. Lightdox is handling international sales.
Schillaci, born in Palermo, Sicily and based in Paris, is a novelist and filmmaker. His 2024 feature documentary Bosco Grande also premiered in the Giornate degli Autori in Venice and went on to win the Grand Prix at the National Competition at FIPADOC Biarritz. His additional directing credits include Tranzicion – art et pouvoir en Albanie (2017), L’ombra del padrino (2016), Apolitics Now! (2013), and The Cambodian Room: Situations with Antoine D’Agata (2009), co-directed by Tommaso Lusena.
In a director’s statement, Schillaci recalled sharing the archival video of Bouyahmed with his protagonist.
“He came to my editing studio, sat down in front of a screen, and I showed him the footage of his youth,” Schillaci writes. “The screen became, in the truest sense, a machine for recovering memory: frame by frame, something reawakened within him. From that day on, this encounter between a man and the ghosts of his own youth became the film’s driving force, its backbone.”
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