Le traumatisme. La trame du temps qui se déchire. Le trou noir qui abolit l’espérance et menace l’identité. Et parfois, comme c’est le cas pour les deux adolescentes que l’on découvre endormies dans le plan inaugural de Wake Up on Mars, les corps qui s’effondrent sous le poids de leur propre sidération. À l’image de centaines d’enfants de familles exilées en attente de régularisation, Ibadeta et Djeneta Demiri sont victimes du « syndrome de résignation », un coma profond qui survient à la suite d’un grand choc émotionnel. Roms du Kosovo et persécutés comme tels, les Demiri ont fui leur terre d’origine et trouvé un point de chute en Suède où les attendait une autre forme d’injustice, celle des politiques migratoires de plus en plus dures et restrictives. Par deux fois, elles ont vu leurs demandes d’asile rejetées, épisodes douloureux à la suite desquels Ibadeta a développé le syndrome catatonique. Deux ans auparavant, le mal avait déjà frappé Djeneta, après que cette dernière eut été témoin de l’agression de son petit frère Furkan, au Kosovo.

Sans rien occulter du quotidien de cette famille, partagé entre les difficiles démarches d’obtention d’un statut de résident et une attention de tous les instants portée aux jeunes filles clouées à leurs lits de sommeil, la caméra de Dea Gjinovci s’attarde sur le plus jeune de la fratrie, Furkan. À l’enfermement intérieur de ses sœurs, le garçon de dix ans oppose un désir d’aventure et de fuite imaginaire, symbolisé par un projet de construction de vaisseau spatial qu’il destine à l’emmener sur Mars. Une part importante du métrage est consacrée à cette quête, le garçon de dix ans se mettant à collecter des matériaux de récupération autour de chez lui, où forêts de contes et cimetières de voitures se côtoient. La cinéaste restitue ce paysage sensuel et mental avec une compréhension intuitive de la lumière et un grand sens de l’image. Très vite, nous comprenons que l’entreprise de Furkan n’a rien d’une lubie. Elle est une manière de conjurer l’angoisse de cette double attente (de la régularisation, du réveil de ses sœurs), de s’échapper du contexte suffoquant qu’elle impose à tous les membres de la famille, et aussi, comme il le laisse entendre au détour d’une phrase — « je pense que tout est de ma faute » — de mettre fin au cercle pernicieux de la culpabilité. 

Articulé autour de ces deux pôles — l’un de recréation fictionnelle, l’autre de captation documentaire — Wake Up on Mars évite les pièges de la métaphore trop explicite ou du tract militant. L’écriture expose intelligemment le cadre de cette maladie peu connue, notamment par le biais de fragments radiophoniques qui reviennent sur sa perception par la société suédoise, entre circonspection de la science et méfiance de certains hommes politiques. Devant cette famille qui fait preuve d’une abnégation et d’une persévérance sans faille, le regard de Dea Gjinovci parvient à trouver la juste distance, celle de l’accompagnement. À cet égard, le basculement dans le fantastique, à la toute fin du film, témoigne du caractère fort et absolu de son geste de cinéaste, et réconforte quant à la capacité inouïe qu’a l’enfance de tracer un chemin de lumière dans la noirceur en apparence la plus totale.  

Wake Up on Mars | Film | Dea Gjinovci | CH-FR 2020 | 75’ | Visions du Réel Nyon 2020, Solothurner Filmtage 2021

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In the beginning of Abyssal, a camera follows a man ascending through an iron spiral staircase to the top of a lighthouse in a silent bay of West Cuba. In the highest part, while the source of brightness gyres and gyres, the anamorphic face of the man sets the tone of this trancelike portrayal of a community of scrap merchants working in a landscape where time seems to come to a stop.

Gloriously far from the socialist realism commandment of “typical people in typical situations”, the workers of Abyssal wander around abandoned places as phantoms trying to make gold out of the waste. The hypnotic quality of the film, its whisper-more-than-a-cry substance, weave an unusual science fiction story where Andrei Tarkovski and Werner Herzog shake hands, and human beings are treated as “beautiful forms” exposing illusions (to be Superman) or wondering about other worlds. In one of the most suggestive shots of the film a man is peeping at life through a hole in a shipwreck, as if this metaphysical abyss upon earth were a vast dungeon. No doubt the scene of an indoor pursuit through narrows corridors of what, at the end, turns out to be a carrier pigeon shows Alonso´s incredible gift for poetry.

Surrounded by a motionless sea, these men, who believe that ships have a soul, compare their visions and thoughts as if they were dead people lost in a reverie. Absorbed by their task of recycling wrecks, these dialectical Sisyphus soften the sense of confinement that permeates the picture with their childish innocence when discussing reality. Though practically every area seems to be part of a prison (in fact, some of the workers are ex-convicts), sometimes closed, sometimes open to the air, their dreams are the windows they need to breathe. 

Avoiding the pornographic exploitation of misery or blind engagement style, Alejandro Alonso has given sense to a reality he knows well, translating it into a “nowhereness” made of garbage and fragments, rags of memories and fantasies. Every image, every sound, is conquered with wisdom and respect towards this group of dreamed dreamers living in the waste. He is probably the Cuban filmmaker that has found the most original metaphors to reveal aspects of daily life in his country. In his films there exists a dignified home for cinema, between a culture cheapened by the rise of tourism and the excess of political propaganda of both sides. The eroded territory populated by suffocating cabins, mute nature, tales of apparitions and disappearances depicted by Alejandro Alonso with restrained piety in Abyssal is the nightmare naïve travellers fears the most: no old cars, no sensuous pieces of flesh dancing, no happy poor.

Abyssal | Film | Alejandro Alonso | CUB-FR 2021 | 30’ | Visions du Réel Nyon 2021

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Dry Winter ploddingly moves us through the lives of three friends in a small town in South Australia. The lens hovers in order to witness the repetition of the everyday tasks of these young people, suspended between the red desert and sea. A highway passes through the town, emitting a sound score of trucks erupting at great speed, leaving the town’s inhabitants behind and impressing upon us an artery of promise at both ends.

Nothing happens beyond what happens as the film details the daily existence of Kelly (Courtney Kelly), Jake (Andrew Phillip) and Michael (Michael Harpas). Hanging washing, loading fridges, washing petrol bowsers, fencing, fishing and catching the fleece of freshly sheared sheep, their nights are spent gaming and eating takeout with a few beers. There is a meditative quality to the mundanity. Little to no dialogue represents communication without conversation. Having grown up in a small, regional coastal town, I can attest to this way of “being together”. The amity between Jake and Michael evokes a touching bromance: their world is simple, supported and safe. Nothing awful happens, people are decent and occupied. The crisis of deliberation for one of the characters to escape the very repetition our attention is drawn to in each successive frame is muffled by this cacophonous silence as dry and desolate as the surrounding land they stare into.

Dry Winter is the creation of a small team of emerging filmmakers who, with ethnographic sincerity, developed trusting relationships with locals and avoided the rookie mistake of romanticising and exaggerating place and landscape beyond inhabitation (Kyle Davis, director; Michael Harpas, producer; Bridget McDonald, writer).

Working with non-trained actors echoes the approach to realist cinema that we find with Andrea Arnold, Ellen Fiske, Ellinor Hallin and Chloe Zhao, where ordinary lives are made extraordinary. Australia offers plenty of opportunities for immersive, realist film making which is no longer visually reliant on rolling out the beauty of our land ad nauseum, nor hyperbolising the larrikinism of Aussie characters and stories stylised to distraction. Davis, Harpas and co. could lead the charge. 

Dry Winter | Film | Kyle Davis | AUS 2021 | 62’ | Visions du Réel Nyon 2021

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Some Kind of Intimacy   

Toby Bull directs his camera toward the sheep, he speaks on the phone with his brother, while he insists on shooting, almost searching for (something in) the sheep. For five minutes, no more than that, and yet, this minimalist film is huge, for it seizes a just intuition, a sort of vision: the brothers’ parents are buried there, where the sheep graze, as if they knew… The camera searching becomes so a clumsy then right way to grieve. With different approaches, the brothers’ longing for the parents seems to find an answer, possibly a presence. Besides the medium of the phone and through the medium of the camera, Bull makes of the animals a visible medium. In this way the animal’s lively silence becomes an unexpected bridge to the beloved that have departed, and we seem to rediscover an ancient truth, in the flesh of the real.

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Khan’s Flesh

Daily life in Belarus, when observed with Western eyes, could sound crazy, but Krystsina Savutsina is not seeking for exoticism in her coming back to her roots. Skilled editing enhances the cutting gesture and often de-contextualised scenes of work, of leisure, of celebration. The sometime humorous, sometime puzzling result is a kaleidoscope of sketches describing a multiple stories structure. However, Khan’s Flesh is something more than a diversion, for at the end of the almost hour of film, and thanks to its peculiar structure, the integration of people in the gears of procedural life emerges as the main theme: a meaningful and critical theme for Belarus.

Some Kind of Intimacy | Short | Toby Bull | UK 2021 | 5’ | Visions du Réel Nyon 2021

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Khan's Flesh | Short | Krystsina Savutsina | BLR-DE 2021 | 57’ | Visions du Réel Nyon 2021

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