Toxicily

Documentary writer and director François-Xavier DESTORS (b. 1986) explores the challenges of remembrance of mass crimes. His commitment as a filmmaker was forged in Rwanda, among the survivors of the Tutsi genocide. His first feature-length documentary, Rwanda, la surface de réparation (86', 2014) tells a different story of the colonial and contemporary history leading up to the genocide, through the social, political and cultural role of soccer. In 2018, he made his second feature-length documentary in Norilsk, one of the world's most extreme cities, a former gulag transformed into a closed city, off-limits to foreigners, controlled with an iron fist by the world's leading producer of copper and nickel. Rooted in the Siberian Far North, Norilsk, l'étreinte de glace is a cinematic exploration of our ability to adapt and survive the unimaginable violence unleashed by man on souls and the environment. With Toxicily, François-Xavier Destors continues his cinematic exploration of sacrificed territories, using the collective history of our industrial societies as a starting point to document an ecocide on Europe's doorstep.

​​Alfonso Pinto, (Palermo, 1983) is a geographer and researcher. After a course of studies in cinema and visual cultures and later in history and geography, in 2016 he defended a doctoral thesis at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (France) on urban imaginaries in disaster cinema. From 2018 to 2022, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the École Urbaine de Lyon directing the images hub. His research invests the field of relations between human and social sciences and audiovisual practices and the topic of environmental and industrial catastrophes. He is the author of numerous scientific and popular publications and in 2021 he published the essay 'The Lighter of the Anthropocene. A brief history of industrial disaster'. Toxicily is his first film experience.