We have invited four filmmakers whose films and ways of working resonate with our disarray, try to give it form. And thereby perhaps even find a response.
In 2011, the young filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi saw the televised images of the tsunami sweeping through villages. He saw the devastated houses, the debris, the desolation. Reacting to the disaster, he sets out with his friend Ko Sakai to meet with survivors and create a work of remembrance and answer the question: what happened? The Tohoku trilogy was initially meant to be a collection of personal accounts but turned out to be far more than that. The filmmaker creates a dispositif that is as much a space for listening as a space for speaking, which transforms each testimony into a performative narrative. By building a personal story with each survivor, he enables the words that flow from the wound to become the source of a new life cycle and help to rebuild the community.
As for Wang Bing, he sets out in 2015 for the Shanghai region at the heart of China’s garment manufacturing industry. For this new film, he had to plunge into a reality alien to him, understand the inhabitants’ way of life, mentality and dialect. Five years of filming with several cameras, 2,600 hours of rushes to capture the violence of a state capitalism whose only rule is the relentless exploitation of young people from rural 26 areas. It is to this new working class that Wang Bing dedicates his tryptic, Youth. A monument that, once again, uncovers in all its harshness the terrible reality of a China where servitude and alienation leave little room for the individual destinies that this Chinese youth nonetheless aspires to.
The youth filmed by Julia Loktev are very different – they belong to an emerging generation of independent journalists opposed to the Russian regime. When she meets them, they are already under dire threat from the regime and, one after the other, designated as “foreign agents”. Yet, they want to stay, work, not flee and, above all, not remain silent. Spoken and written words are their arms, their youth and conviction are their strength. This intense desire to speak, to analyse, to explain but also comment on their situation with humour is what Julia Loktev films every day, phone in hand, as a frantic crossing from one situation to another, in the urgency and uncertainty of their life. When the war against Ukraine breaks out, the tension mounts and gradually, for most of them, the only choice is to leave the country. “The world you are about to see no longer exists” warns Julia Loktev at the beginning of the film.
Lebanese filmmaker Ghassan Salhab belongs to a world where chaos and destruction have been alternating for decades. While the Israeli army was bombing Gaza, Southern Lebanon and the Golan Heights and at a time that Palestine was once again experiencing a real human disaster, we asked him: how are you? I’m defeated but not resigned. With him, we will explore the question of doing, with the very Godard-like idea in mind that doing means simultaneously admitting our disappointment at Art’s ineffectiveness, yet trying to bring some answers by adopting a political approach through texts, ideas, gestures and images. Because, for all that, surely everything can be born again from the ruins?
Catherine Bizern