Artist and filmmaker Eric Baudelaire spent four years interacting with the pupils of a film class, at a secondary school in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis. Keeping himself on the sidelines, he gives way to the children to express their thoughts and dreams. Their remarks are intuitive, inquisitive, yet passionate and surprisingly mature, concerning rocky and complicated issues, ranging from racism, immigration, and identity, all the way to the possibilities of film as a medium. As time flows almost unnoticed, it is evident that these children have not only become the co-directors of this film but also the heroes of their own lives.

Eric Baudelaire, artist and photographer, films on Super-8 the political and personal reflections of May, the daughter of the founder of the Japanese Red Army Shigenobu, and of Adachi Masao, the legendary experimental filmmaker who gave up film to fight for the Palestinian cause. Like his compatriot Philippe Grandrieux, the French artist Eric Baudelaire has made a personal film about the history of the Japanese Red Army (JRA), an extreme left-wing group that took up arms in the early 1970s in order to realise the proletarian revolution. The JRA hijacked aeroplanes and in 1972 organised a raid on the airport of Lod, in which 26 people died. They also fought in Lebanon, with the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). On the soundtrack, we hear the story of the Japanese filmmaker Adachi Masao, who lived in Beirut for years and at the time was spokesman for the JRA. Shigenobu May, the daughter of Shigenobu Fusako, the woman who founded the JRA, talks about her childhood in Lebanon and her many secret identities. Baudelaire illustrates their stories with 8mm films that he made in Beirut and Tokyo, at the places where both were active. We also see clips from films by Adachi and newsreel footage of the attack at Lod and the arrest of Shigenobu Fusako in 2000.

On a beach in Beirut, Lili and Michel meet… or maybe they are coming together again. An unlikely couple caught between two different eras, between a future and a past that seem possibly interchangeable, they are trying to establish what is an ambiguous memory: that of a terrorist act, an explosion and the loss of a child, Elena. The voice of a Japanese narrator adds a further layer of complication to their scrambled memories in evoking his own past in war-torn Beirut and the 27 years he spent alongside Palestinians as a member of the Japanese Red Army. Michel and Lili’s destiny seems subject to the mystery that this man, the legendary screenwriter of the Japanese New Wave, Masao Adachi, has created for them, and which he punctuates with a series of revelations.

Also Known As Jihadi est une histoire possible d’un homme raconté à travers les lieux qu’il a traversé, ainsi que des extraits de documents : interrogatoires de police, écoutes, filatures… Tourner la caméra à 180 degrés pour tracer un cheminement, en filmant non pas le sujet du film, mais plutôt ce qu’il a vu. La clinique où il est né à Vitry, les ensembles où il a grandi, son lycée, l’université, le travail, et puis l’envol pour l’Égypte, la Turquie et finalement la route d’Alep, où il a rejoint le Front al Nusra, en 2012. Chronique judiciaire qui devient progressivement un film de genre, un thriller lent où l’on accepte le fait de se sentir troublé face à l’incompréhensible, en sachant intuitivement, humainement, que l’incompréhensible doit pourtant avoir ses raisons.