At a vocational college for the hotel industry, Alma, Moussa, Chaïli, Sarah and their classmates swap their everyday clothes, smartphones and chewing gum for uniforms and serving trays. At the college restaurant and in the classroom, they learn the rules and precisely processes linked to French restaurant service: a field in which tradition, discipline and perfection are a priority. Strict, yet fair, the teachers convey the value of a profession that demands patience and putting one’s needs to the side above all else. Between teaching sessions and the different components of service, the portrait of a generation confronted with the expectations of the labour market comes into focus: they need to learn a profession and conform while simultaneously looking for recognition and their own path. The film observes these young people in their training routines with sympathy and attentiveness and explores the contrasts between the idealised image of gastronomy and the harsh reality. For them, this training isn’t always a decision based on conviction, but merely one of the few possible paths into professional life. A lively, unadorned look at becoming an adult and looking for one’s place in a future that offers little and demands many compromises.

Lina Dinkla

Luscious avocado plantations. Smoke rising on the horizon. Then echoes of explosions. In the “Envelope”, just before the border with Gaza, Yo, Tom, Yan, Piak and Lee work in Israeli fields. Like many other migrant workers, they were recruited from Thailand. They work for below-market wages, often seven days a week, up to 17 hours a day, to support their distant families. They are being observed by a robot snake that crawls through the fields looking for Hamas tunnels beneath the farmland. Bullet casings among the weeds, makeshift shelters in front of the barracks – a psychogeography of fear and vulnerability. Sometimes, in brief moments of leisure, the light-hearted games and the community of young men provide a distraction. On 7 October 2023, the underworld opens up and interrupts the film, which then shifts to the families of the victims. On the banks of the Mekong, the mythical snake god Naga guards the threshold between the living and the dead. An intangible, floating and empathic narrative about precarious labour movements through a military-agrarian complex.

Jan Künemund