Highly acclaimed for his documentary The Magic Mountain [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] (screened in the IFFR’s Bright Future section in 2020) and his fiction film Low Tide [+leggi anche:
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Through this documentary, Daniel Mann will look to present a political re-reading of the popular movie Rambo III, shot in the Negev desert on Israeli-Palestinian territory. It will explore the special relationship which the State of Israel enjoyed in the 1980s/90s with Hollywood super-productions, in the colonial context of expropriation and state violence which had been a reality since the Nakba, especially for Bedouin communities. As in his previous films, Mann disrupts the narrative register typical of documentary films by availing himself of a parallel story structure.

The documentary takes us back to 1987 when Bashir Abu Rabiah was hired to help with pyrotechnic and special effects on the movie Rambo III. In this example of a Hollywoodian saga, iconic bodybuilder Sylvester Stallone crosses the desert on horseback, battling alone against the Soviet forces occupying Afghanistan at the time. Alongside the imaginary story and aesthetic of this film, shot in the desert of the Naqab (Negev) in Palestine, another story has always unfurled for Bedouin Bashir Abu Rabiah, revolving around a far more realistic, occupation-based conflict…

Under a Blue Sun is produced by Christophe Gougeon on behalf of Parisian firm Acqua Alta, in co-production with Israel’s Laila Films and French outfit La Bête, in association with Arte France La Lucarne and with support from the CNC, the French National Centre of Plastic Arts, the Sud region, Procirep-Angoa, the MiDarom Film Fund and the Rabinovich Foundation.

For the record, Acqua Alta recently co-produced François Caillat’s documentary The Many Lives of Edouard Louis and are currently preparing Antonin Peretjatko’s Vade Retro.