2022 Docmonde Docmonde
The Docmonde programme brings together films whose screenplays were developed during residences organised by the eponymous association in different points around the globe. The four films to be screened this year come from Armenia, French Guiana, Tunisia and Georgia. The spaces they explore have, in principle, nothing in common, but their themes have a striking similarity. The filmmaker is placed alongside their protagonists in an interstitial space that always connects two distinct “worlds”: patriarchy and sorority, ennemy territories, the dead and the living… In this gap, the filmmakers become a relay not only for images but also for stories. They have gone on an exploration of familiar spaces that they frequent, or have frequented, all the time engaged in an immense labour of deconstructing their ways of looking, of hearing, and drawing from these interstitial spaces material that questions these worlds and their permeability.
Inna Mkhitaryan, director of Tonratun opens her first film with a shot of confounding beauty, its light seeming to be inspired by certain baroque Flemish paintings. In the tonratun, an oven used until recently by women to cook the lavash, traditional Armenian bread, the filmmaker’s mother is busy preparing dough. At the heart of her approach, the filmmaker reactivates this place as a site of cinema, having well understood that around the tandoor, things were not just about making bread. The discourse of these women unravels to speak about how successive wars and the ancient oppression of the Armenian people have directly affected their lives, including their motherhood. In this essential space of sorority at the heart of a profoundly patriarchal society, the filmmaker presents us with this history of Armenia as seen by its women.
Maradia Tsaava, in her first film Water Has No Borders, tells the story of another region in conflict in a radically different place. The operation of a hydroelectric power plant located on the Enguri – whose arch dam was for a long time the highest in the world – is shared between Georgia up river, and Abkhazia several kilometers further down. Abkhazia is a former Georgian territory that seceded in 1992 following an armed conflict, and refuses access to its land by Georgian citizens. It has become for the latter a lost paradise, an inaccessible fairy tale. While waiting for a possible authorisation to pass to the other side, Maradia moves around this absurd site of space-time where only water can pass, but not human beings. There, accompanied by Ika, she becomes a transmitter of stories by a community torn from its other half for political motives.
Gardien des mondes is the title of Leïla Chaïbi’s film, a title that inspires this work and constitutes its main thread. In the Jellaz cemetery, principal cemetery in Tunis, she films Hassan who arrived there after a tumultuous life. As he tells the tale, he fell asleep nearly forty years ago at the foot of a grave. On awaking, he never left the cemetery. There, he set up residency, found peace, lived as an indigent near his mother who is buried there and to whom he confides daily. He also opens up to the filmmaker who sketches the portrait of this protector of the dead and observer at a distance from the living. Engraved in the hollows, we also perceive the portrait of a space suspended between two worlds, and also that of the Tunisians who come to visit their buried.
Finally, the space between the world of the dead and the living is explored by two other filmmakers in Wani. On the Guiana banks of the river Maroni at Maripasoula, near his home among the community of Aluku, Kerth Agounti accompanied by co-director Nicolas Pradal, takes us by the hand. They take up position near Wani Doudou, son of the traditional chief who died several years ago. With his disappearance, a whole series of gestures and rituals seems to have disappeared with him. Filming their character who is facing a vertiginous existential void, they plunge with him to the heart of the rites of his community. The people attempt to remember the correct ordering of the ceremony, in order to maintain the fragile balance between the spirits of the dead and their grieving families.
Aurélien Marsais
Screenings hosted by Aurélien Marsais.
In the presence of the directors.