Nyon Film Festival 2009

Jared Bloch

The sound of dogs barking throughout sets the tone for this bleak film by Mathias Montavon and Marianne Thivillier.  A bombed out or otherwise disintegrated Georgian infrastructure in a nameless city, serves as backdrop for the poetic text provided by Thivillier via a narrative voice.

Amazingly, according to Thivillier, the text was largely the product of spontaneous musings on the themes of war and destruction and was not written specifically as a counterpart to the imagery in the film, which is at least as bleak as the text. The dog howls add perfectly to the narrative depicting human regression to a feral state.

The video footage for the film is based almost entirely on images of live mannequins, petrified humans arranged or captured amidst the rubble of destroyed factories and urban landscape. The images depicting the breakdown of civilization are all the more unnerving juxtaposed with the beautiful human forms, frozen as if in death. The one exception is a shot of three wildamen at rest outside, one delousing another, when suddenly they are frightened and run off.

This paradox sat heavy on my mind long after viewing. As a viewer, I expected to see the dead and deathlike images in these apocalyptic surroundings, not animals living amidst the debris, much-less human animals.  “Most of the inhabitants have left, but a handful of us will stay. . .wild like the dogs who will take over the town,” intones the narrator.

To the audience,  the fact of living, not of dying in these conditions, may be the more disturbing.

For more information see the Visions du Réel Film Festival website.

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