Films Without Borders: An Introduction‪.‬

The world is coming apart like a poorly sewn suit. A Brivele der Mamen/A Letter to Mother (Joseph Green, 1938) In the opening scene of Tony Gatlif's 2004 feature Exils/Exiles, which won the prize for direction at the Cannes Film Festival the same year, a naked man (Romain Duris) drinking a glass of beer stands at the window of a nondescript high-rise apartment building looking out at the traffic on a highway. On what seems to be the soundtrack but is actually a stereo playing in the room, a woman's voice chants in English an activist song entitled "Manifesto" about democracy and freedom being violated, taken up halfway through by a man's voice in Spanish. In the bed facing the window, a naked woman (Lubna Azabal) gluttonously eats a bowl of ice cream. After dropping the glass out of the window which unceremoniously crashes below, the man turns off the stereo and proposes in French to the woman that they go to Algeria. This suggestion elicits howls of laughter from the woman and a derisive question asking him what he possibly thinks he will do in Algeria. Before the opening credit sequence begins, a nondiegetic insert, which is really a flash forward, of an extreme long shot of a large group of people moving across a barren and arid landscape appears as the red letters of the film's title are superimposed on the image.