There is a relentlessness in these testimonies that echoed through the festival week, in Djamel Sellani’s "Algeriennes" ("Women of the Algerian War") a documentary narrated by female veterans of the anti-colonial struggle with France; in "Nuit Noire: 17 Octobre 1961 "("Black Night"), a recreation of the night when Paris gendarmes killed and “disappeared” between 48 and 200 peaceful Algerian demonstrators; and in "Massaker" (Massacre), which presents testimonies by some of the Phalangist militiamen who, as the film shows, enacted but did not script the 1982 slaughter of some 2,000 people in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Not all the festival’s entries were unequivocal in their message.

“There is no need for a plot,” proclaims the protagonist of Underexposure. Yet the overall impression was indelible: a pictorial staccato of Arabs being mauled, executed and herded into variously configured holding camps.