By Nouha Bouazizi
Short movie « Human » directed by Eya Belhaj Rehouma
The trash makes its journey from the buildings to the sea.
The waves swallow it.
Or is it dreams, people, traces of crime that vanish with the sea ?
How do we document what’s already gone ? Trashed ? Vanished ?
The Director is adamant on trying. She speaks to us of “The Eradication Party of Reptiles”.
Her words echo with frustration and loss.
By the time we arrive, the party is over, the reptiles gone, the violence fulfilled.
The tables cleared. The silence intact.
“As if nothing happened, as if the tables weren’t set. As if the mosquitos did not cry”.
Through the window of her room, we observe her writing. Intimately.
Voyeurs of her process we are, just as voyeur of the city she is.
We also follow her in the street. She takes out her camera.
She shows us the sea, the stray cats, the night sky through a metro window.
Large dark images; they reflect blackness.
She captures the void in images, then translates it into fragments – words, a poem, a scenario.
Desperately, she struggles to make a documentary. I struggle to grasp the essence of her documentary. But doesn’t the struggle itself become the documentary?
The impossibility of documentation itself, pushed to the extreme, turns into documentation.
The Director, having missed the party, documents what remains. In the streets and especially in herself. For these are in fact the only elements in her possession.
A stranger, she walks amid remnants. A tangible distance between her raw emotion and the dead surroundings. A contrast between her and her lover. A silence she fills with her words and with a revolutionary opera aria, “Ave Maria”.
Whether she faces us, the mirror, or the sea, the traces of past violence linger on her face and bear witness to the story.
Her face becomes a central piece of the documentary.
She is the documentary.
Because if she is unable to show us the Reptiles, at least she shows us the crying Mosquito. Herself.
Similar to the protagonists in Camus’s The Stranger or Paul Auster’s City of Glass, she merges within her character the former’s early existentialism with the latter’s postmodernism, creating an oeuvre that defies the limits between literature and film.
And that is enough. Or, if not, she offers us more. A bonus. She gives us a Riot. And a color: Red.
