The 6th edition of LabDoc welcomes in 2025 a new group of documentary filmmakers from across the Mediterranean region. Under the artistic direction of Adriano Valerio, participants will be guided by Shu Aiello, Giulia Achilli, and Rebecca Houzal during two residency sessions, held in Marseille from April 14 to 18 and from September 8 to 12, 2025.
Since the beginning of the genocide, I have felt a deep need to return to Palestine, to support my parents and my people in this overwhelming moment. It seems vital to me to document my deeply artistic roots, especially as war targets culture to erase our identity and control the narrative. I decided to film the daily life of the Ashtar Theater in Ramallah, founded by my parents in the 90s, a cultural center that shaped my personality and my art. Following my parents into their theater, I capture their silent struggles and acts of resilience that reveal both the weight of the occupation and their unwavering strength and dedication to art as a tool of resistance.
The world is a continuous choreography; dancing is not only on stage, but also behind the scenes. Three stories dance in balance between success and scars, with chaos within them to create dancing stars.
A Spanish woman travels to Uruguay in search of an absent father whom she last saw 12 years ago. At the age of 6, a cassette tape that her mother listened to constantly and a vivid imagination led her to believe that her father was Erik Satie. Now that she is 36, this fantasy has been revived after the unexpected result of a DNA test: 29% of her genetic heritage is French. To clear up this confusion, she undertakes to meet his father at a notary and legally recognize him as his father. But first, she has to find him.
A meeting of octogenarian brothers and sisters, gathered around a board game invented by their father, to reflect on the migratory journey of a family who fled the Armenian genocide.
During the 1970s and 80s, an autonomous, libertarian movement stirred up disorder in Toulouse. Heirs of May ’68, of the anti-Franco struggle and of Situationism, they targeted work, prisons, computer surveillance, and the spread of nuclear power. Now grandpas and grandmas with highly respectable appearances, forty years after their exploits, they recount to us their explosive years.
When I turned thirty, I felt it was time for me to become a mother. However, I faced a few obstacles: I was single, without a stable job, my parental role model gave me the creeps and my fertility was beginning an irreversible decline. For five years, I filmed all the steps that led me to motherhood and today I am sending an audiovisual story to my future child to depict the beginnings of his conception.
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Giulia Achilli is an Italian film producer. After studying in Milan, she moved to India where she produced a fiction feature (Barah Aana, distributed in 140 prints across the country) and a documentary, Inshallah, Football, which received a Special Jury Mention in Dubai and a National Film Award in India.
In 2013, she joined Dugong Films, a Rome-based production company whose films have screened at the world's leading international festivals: in Berlin (Disco Boy by Giacomo Abbruzzese, Silver Bear for Best Artistic Contribution 2023), in Cannes (Samouni Road by Stefano Savona, Golden Eye for Best Documentary 2018), in Venice (Casablanca by Adriano Valerio, Atlantide by Yuri Ancarani, Tony Driver by Ascanio Petrini, among others), in Locarno (Weightless by Sara Fgaier, 2024; The Challenge by Yuri Ancarani, Special Jury Prize 2016) and in Rotterdam. Dugong Films' work has also been presented at institutions such as the Tate Modern, MoMA and Art Basel. The company has won the Eurimages Lab Project Award three times, a prize dedicated to innovative projects exploring new forms of cinematic expression.
In 2023, Giulia Achilli was nominated for the David di Donatello Award for Best Producer for Disco Boy. She is currently in production on Davide Manuli's new feature, Astrea, and in advanced development on Rä Di Martino's second film (Ya & Niki, FidLab winner) and Giacomo Abbruzzese's next feature, Disorder.
Shu Aiello is a French filmmaker and production manager of Calabrian origin, based in Marseille. She regularly collaborates with 13 Production and develops documentary work focused on questions of identity, memory and social engagement, particularly in relation to colonial history and peripheral territories. Her Franco-Italian dual background informs a sensitive and political perspective on contemporary realities.
She co-directed with Catherine Catella Un paese di Calabria (2016), about the welcome given to refugees in the village of Riace, followed by Leoforio (2019), dedicated to a transport cooperative in Greece. Their latest film, Un paese di resistenza (2024), explores contemporary forms of resistance in rural Italy. The film has screened at numerous festivals: Utopies Réelles, Festival du Film Engagé, Caméra des Champs, Fête de l'Humanité, FifiGros, Festival Jean Rouch, Plateau des Glières – Forum des Résistances, Label Rouge, Zones Portuaires, Festival italien de Villerupt and Montélimar, Biogra (Bologna), Faito (Naples), Droits Humains (Brussels), among others.
Rebecca Houzel co-founded the production company Petit à Petit at the end of 2006. It produces mainly documentaries, selected and awarded at numerous festivals in France and abroad, a significant proportion of which are destined for theatrical release. She supports both young and established filmmakers. At the heart of her production choices is the need she perceives among filmmakers for films that change the way they look at the issues and territories they explore. It has developed an international network, particularly to produce Eastern European auteurs, and is beginning to develop feature-length fiction films.
