2019 Docmonde Docmonde
Filming one’s family, one’s daily life, exploring family archives, questioning one’s parents or coming closer to one’s elders, getting involved personally, by staging a sequence or moving to the other side of the camera… Questioning what is close to us is a recurrent practice in documentary cinema. And the directors of the films in this programme, initiated within the Docmonde network – training sessions in documentary writing carried out throughout the world from Lussas – have generously made this idea theirs. The approach is simple: film what you know best in order to reduce distance with spectators, attempt to give them access to what is far away, strange, past, disappeared, indeed even invisible.
Filming what is close can also mean filming the details of daily life that seem unimportant. In Phalène, Artur Sokolov compiles meticulously with the help of his camera the habits of the members of his family in a village in Siberia. He creates a picture book for himself, to keep a trace of his house and its inhabitants, and yet this picture book speaks just as clearly to us viewers.
In Schoon Donker, Katrien Feyaerts returns to the house where she grew up and that she left twenty years earlier. She films her father and the men of her street who raise carrier pigeons. She films within a closed space between bungalows and small gardens the gestures of daily life, those that prepare flights, departures.
It also means filming places crossed thousands of times to reveal their particularity. So it is with the streets of Toamasina in Madagascar, filmed from the doorstep of Roméo’s shop in Nofinofy. The discussions recorded by Michaël Andrianaly are those of every day. People talk about education, prison terms, corruption, in simple words. This proximity transforms the listing of popular grievances into little stories, which become legends within the space of a film.
In Étincelles, a village literally cut in half between Muslims and Christians on the edge of West Africa is the theatre for a tale. But the personal inquiry by Bawa Kadade Riba to understand in what part of the village he can build his house becomes a metaphor for a world in the throes of an identity crisis where it has become truly difficult to find one’s place.
It also means observing the past and moments of history with a certain distance that the time gone by has not been sufficient to create. In Hitch, Chowra Makaremi retraces the history of her mother, an opponent of the Islamic Republic of Iran, who was assassinated in prison in the eighties. She collects bits and pieces and fragments of recollections to recompose the erased memory of a forgotten story.
With the same idea, that of creating an image, a reconstitution of what one hasn’t lived, Young Sun Noh in Yukiko frees herself from a non-existent archive to recount the life of her Japanese grandmother, unknown and disappeared in the tumultuous history of the colonisation of Korea by Japan. From Okinawa to the South-Korean island of Kanghwa, the filmmaker seeks the echo of this obliterated history by exploring the empty sites that were its setting.
To evoke this silenced past, of which few images remain because it belonged to a taboo period of history, Mathieu Tavernier uses animation. In Dann zardin pépé, he tells out loud and in creole, his oppressed language, the story of his family and of the stretch of land where his family identity was built, on memories deliberately erased by the coloniser.
Finally in Unt, les origines, it is yet another distant language, Kali’na, that accompanies us into the heart of the Amazon rainforest. The voice of Yanouwana Christophe Pierre, mixed with the sounds of the jungle, transmits the tale of the funeral rite that he must carry out personally. Based on this family affair, he questions the transmission of identity and culture made difficult by the transformation and disappearance of the sites of traditional life.
Examining the world so closely and revealing its details makes us conscious of the basic elements, things in common between different peoples. The most intimate stories, told from the right position, transmit the power to feel, share, remember and discover these commonalities. Little details, filmed so far, become, before the camera of these filmmakers, documents of a world that moves and concerns us. Filming what is closest makes it possible to reduce distances and differences of religion or language by narrating the legends of the world.
Madeline Robert
Debates led by Madeline Robert.
In the presence of the directors and/or producers.