Patrick Wells
Great Britain
2011 | 0:25:00

In June 2011, I travelled to the besieged Libyan city of Misrata and spent three weeks living with The Martyr’s Brigade, a group of young revolutionaries fighting on the front line outside town. Holding the Line, my first film, is the result: a rare in-depth portrait of citizens fighting for their rights - and their lives - against their own government. . The film explores the disconnect between the actual experience of conflict and the way it is so often portrayed in movies and the media, examining the differences between the men's glamorised preconceptions of war and the realities they have experienced. A unique insight into some of the reality of daily life on the front lines of a foreign civil war, the fighters’ hopes for the future and their reflections on killing, fear, loss and death. It also starkly portrays some of the human cost of political repression in Libya.

Fritz Ofner
Austria
2012 | 1:13:00

A road trip through Libya during the last weeks of the revolution against Muammar al-Gaddafi's regime. LIBYA HURRA documents a collective mood characterizing people in one particular place in a narrow time window. Without losing itself in facts and statements, the film outlines realities of life in long sequence takes shot during an armed revolution, which usually - even from a country in the focus of media reporting - remains completely hidden. At the end of LIBYA HURRA, the filmmaker stands in front of Gaddafi's former palace. The revolution is over and the time window closed again.