Festival Films A-Z

Drowned by Oblivion

Production

Cobra Films
29, rue de la Sablonnière
1000 Brüssel
Belgien
Tel.: +32 2 25 12 70 07
Fax: +32 25 11 38 28
E-Mail: cobrafilms@skynet.be

Zeugma Films
7, rue Ganneron
75018 Paris
Frankreich
Tel.: +33 1 43 87 00 54
E-Mail: zeugma-films@noos.fr

Camera

Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd

Cut

Philippe Boucq

Worldsales

GSARA asbl
26, rue du Marteau
1210 Brüssel
Belgien
Tel.: +32 2 25 01 885
E-Mail: sandra.demal@gsara.be
Tel.: +32 2 250 13 14
Fax: +32 2 217 29 02
E-Mail: info@disc.be
Internet: www.gsara.be

(Le cercle des noyés)
B/F 2007, Regie: Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd, OmeU, 71 min.

Synopsis

Le cercle des noyésLe cercle des noyés (the circle of the drowned) is the name given in Mauritania to the group of political prisoners, who - from 1986 on - were imprisoned for years in the old colonial fortress of Oualata because they had fought for black equality. This film shows one former inmate's attempts to deal with his memories as he tells his story and that of his fellow prisoners. In a visual echo, the viewer sees the places of their confinement one after another.

The visible and the invisible
"It has been said that cinema films death at work. Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd's recent films are there to remind us how the two activities - filming and vanishing - are inseparable. They discourage the image, they make it impossible or they reroute it by giving it another sense and let the distance of time act on itself. There is the before and the after. The after is left to those who live and who will try, through words and meetings, to understand and to fill the emptiness, to make the invisible visible.
For over 10 years, Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd has been travelling through Africa, mostly in Mauritania and Sudan; an arid Africa that battles with the winds and the sand and, like all other places, wears itself out with wars and dictatorships. Humans are fragile there. Villages and trees are disappearing, nomads are losing their landmarks and reprieved or surviving populations are waiting for some sort of salvation, for the end of starvation, or perhaps for another fight against more hostile enemies (...).

Drowned by Oblivion is a film about ghosts, those for whom only the miraculous survival of their bodies and the courage of their words remain as a testament. Today, only arrogant or shallow people can film their infamy directly; for them, showing violence is a normal gesture authorized by political and pornographic politics and propaganda's debilitating certitudes. Dictators, whoever they are, need silence and obscurity to accompany their work of oppression and destruction. Their work cannot put up with either sound or image. And now, 20 years on, cinema is pointing towards death. A hoarse, factual and implacable monologue. Words as hard as rocks, and simply the prison?s stones to show. Each grain of sand accuses. Each dream denounces. The aridity of the landscape is like a metaphor. The distance, the end of the world, like imprisonment. And the broken men. The main image depicts the 'after', whereas the sound is provided by an account told in the present. But image and sound encounter memory. And there is no death without memory. This is also a definition of cinema: making the invisible visible. Jacqueline Aubenas

Biography

Nemadis (1994), Sida d'ici et de là-bas (1998), Nemadis, des années sans nouvelles (2000), Racines lointaines (2002), Closed district (2004), Drowned by Oblivion (2007)

Filmography

Nemadis (1994), Sida d'ici et de là-bas (1998), Nemadis, des années sans nouvelles (2000), Racines lointaines (2002), Closed district (2004), Drowned by Oblivion (2007)

Dates

2904.10.200718:00Kommkino
5806.10.200719:15Filmhaus