Director David Dusa’s FLEURS DU MAL (FLOWERS OF EVIL) earned him the coveted title as Calgary International Film Festival’s 2011 Maverick filmmaker. Dusa was one of the eight first-time feature filmmakers competing for the $5,000 cash prize.

Beginning with a man in Tunisia burning himself to death in December 2010, and continuing through the Syrian and Lybian revolutions, pro-democracy rebellions erupted across the Middle East in the “Arab Spring.” Dusa’s film is the first to document the on-the-ground reality of technology-fuelled social change now sending shockwaves through the Arab world. It also has the eternally captivating power of a good old-fashioned love story.

Gecko, a young, carefree Parisian street-dancer, meets Anahita, an Iranian in exile, and finds himself tangled up in her history and the live internet broadcasts of the chaos in Iran following the controversial election in June of 2009. When the Islamic government cracked down on the traditional media, the citizens started broadcasting information through the internet. These brutal images reached the world directly – and now David Dusa’s FLEURS DU MAL personalizes them.