We have rounded up a selection of 3 outstanding and thought-provoking short documentary films that we discovered at the 2021 Cinéma du réel.
The 43rd edition of the Cinéma du réel was remarkable on many levels: on top of bringing the best documentaries to France-based online audiences, the festival offered a rich program full of cinematic curiosities. Some of our top picks among the feature films presented at this year’s edition were The Filmmakers’ House and A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces. Film Fest Report Contributor Claire also got interested in the short film program where she spotted three outstanding short documentaries, revolving around the issues of security, the police and law enforcement, some of which have picked up nice awards at the festival. Read on to discover three shorts worth watching!
Nightvision (Dir. Clara Claus)
Clara Claus is an artist and a filmmaker, who assists famous photographer Thomas Hoepker at his house, in the Hamptons (near New-York). At work, she is tasked to erase dust on the film scans, print the photos, send prints to clients… And she takes the opportunity to film herself during her daily life.
Some day, on security camera footage, she realizes that one man is spying on her during the night. According to the photographer, it is an unfriendly neighbor, who has a troubled past. The footage is in black and white, is very grainy and has poor details, it is apparently impossible for the police to do anything about it.
Thomas has to leave the house for eight days, he asks Clara to stay at the house so she can take care of his dog, Clarita. Even if Clarita’s presence brings some comfort to Clara, she has to face this weird and blurry abstraction stalking on her, alone. The atmosphere begins to feel heavier and more worrisome. Borrowing narrative codes from thrillers and scary movies, director Clara Claus personifies this hazy silhouette as a monster.
Most of the time on a tripod, Clara’s camera is also moving. She never talks to the camera but somehow, I could feel the camera’s presence. Could the camera be a character, and could it reassure Clara? As Ingmar Bergman once said: “Isn’t art always, to a certain extent, a therapy for the artist?”
Random Patrol (Dir. Yohan Guignard)
In Oklahoma City’s suburbs (USA), Matt is an ordinary policeman and has to check that everything is in order. On his random patrol, french director Yohan Guignard followed and interviewed him for thirty minutes. Behind his sunglasses, no emotion seems to show on Matt’s face.
While we see the copy-pasted houses through Matt’s car window, the neighborhood seems rather empty and falsely peaceful. Hand on the gun when a citizen talks to him, Matt shares to Yohan his obsessed fear of dying. As police brutality got more recognition in the USA (and in other countries as well), the media and population seem to have dehumanized police men. Somehow, this documentary plays on a paradox where director Yohan Guignard gave the voice to a policeman ; but a policeman who got purged from his humanity and compassion, distanced from the people and citizens from his own hometown. Having a glance at who Matt is as an individual was quite impactful, he opens up for a little while and we can see his humanness. The balance between Matt representing an institution and him being a human seems tricky for him. This film brings nuances to the media’s representation of policemen, it made me wonder: do we criticize the institution or the men?
Kindertotenlieder (Dir. Virgil Vernier)
On October 27th 2005, teenagers Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, who lived in Clichy-sous-Bois (Paris’ suburbs), were controlled by the police but they ran and were hunted by policemen. They got trapped into electric units and got electrocuted. Three days later, tear grenades were shot by forces of order near a mosque of the neighborhood while people were praying. Those dramatic events started major riots. Not as a wide and influential as an event as the Black Lives Matter Movement triggered by George Floyd’s death, the 2005 riots are part of the French contemporary history – it is the longest and most important riots since May 68, France’s major civil unrest movement of the 20th Century.
Director Virgil Vernier, with the authorization of TF1 (France’s main television channel), uses old TV footage to make this film Kindertotenlieder and reflects on those riots. Without the voice-over and journalistic comments, the editing and combination of all those archives give off a powerful message on French suburbs’ living conditions and the representation of Parisian suburbs in mainstream media.
The voices were given to the population of the neighborhood, most of them were scared and worried, families with children, people with little salaries staying up all night looking after their cars. The kids conducting the riots were almost never interviewed, their frustration and anger only manifested through what was described as chaos. While most of the interviewed people shared their fears, some people focused on their experience as people of color, facing facial discrimination from the police.
By words and action, people were only asking for justice and a more accurate idea of equality (as the french motto says “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” – “Liberty, equality, fraternity”). In response, the government chose confrontation and violence. In the wake of the Yellow Vests (“Gilets Jaunes”) movement, which sparked in late 2018 in France, violence and brutality from the police, once again came to the surface, therefore bringing another question: when will “forces of order” become “gardiens de la paix” (literal translation : “peace guardians”) again? In this regard, Virgil Vernier’s film echoes David Dufresnes’ The Monopoly of Violence in which a group of citizens question and confront their views on the social order, and the legitimacy of the use of violent police force.
