X-ray images were invented in 1895, the same year in which the Lumière brothers presented their respective invention in what today is considered to be the first cinema screening. Thus, both cinema and radiography fall within the scopic regime inaugurated by modernity. The use of X-rays on two sculptures from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum generates images that reveal certain elements of them that would otherwise be invisible to our eyes. These images, despite being generally created for technical or scientific purposes, seem to produce a certain form of 'photogénie': they lend the radiographed objects a new appearance that lies somewhere between the material and the ethereal, endowing them with a vaporous and spectral quality. It is not by chance that physics and phantasmagoria share the term 'spectrum' in their vocabulary.

Le 1er novembre 1954, le Front de libération nationale de l'Algérie annonce la guerre pour l'indépendance du pays. La France, colonisatrice depuis 1830, s'empresse de renforcer son contingent militaire aux quatre coins du pays et d'empêcher l'avancée des rebelles. Un petit Chaoui, né dans une région montagneuse du pays, voit son enfance placide s'effondrer au milieu d'un feu croisé qu'il ne comprend pas. Le récit, inspiré de témoignages réels, est construit avec des images issues des archives de l'armée française. De ce dialogue apparemment dissocié entre image et parole naît un hommage sensible à la mémoire qui repose dans les archives et à la voix ignorée de ses protagonistes.

The six-decade transformation of a block of houses, shown by means of artfully featured archival shots, highlights the beauty and sadness of human-made decay. In the blink of an eye 66 years pass by and a savings bank replaces a church.

A city made of cinema. A cinema that imagines the city of Christmas.