Visions du Réel 2024: Going South | Review
Going South explores the clash between trivial vacation aspirations and urgent environmental activism in a theoretically exciting short, yet its execution lacks the punch needed to make a lasting impact.
How does the human species face its greatest environmental challenge when all it wants is to head towards a vacation destination? This is the confrontation cleverly depicted in Going South (Im Stau), Alan Sahin’s short documentary film, which premiered at Visions du Réel 2024 in Nyon, Switzerland.
The film follows several motorists separately and simultaneously on Swiss roads. We embark with a mother and her teenage daughter, a group of young women seemingly on a bachelorette weekend, a couple driving their comfortable camper van, a family with a child, and so forth. The editing brings these people together on the same boat, the highway. Suddenly, the vacation route becomes heavily congested near the Gotthard Road Tunnel, which connects Switzerland to Italy. The word spreads quickly: a group of environmental activists is disrupting traffic to raise awareness about the urgency of the situation.
The film revels in that precise moment when the activists’ action clashes with the motorists’ day-to-day vacation plans. This interruption of the perfect vacation plan brings a gradient of frustration and impatience among the subjects we follow.
It may seem trivial, but the film captures such an important question. When is the right time to talk about biodiversity loss and climate change? Is there ever a wrong time, like when one desires a vacation? The weight and significance of this existential issue of climate change, judiciously left off-screen in this film, collide with the triviality and insignificance of a car trip that motorists want to be smooth for various understandable reasons.
Addressing climate change and acting to reduce our footprint, yes, but not when all we want is to go on vacation carefree… The film rightly points out that the problem lies in the fact that our way of life simply acts as a steamroller, inevitably causing environmental degradation. The climate issue should be a constant concern, even when going on vacation.
However, while all this constitutes the theoretical heart of a good short film, Going South seems barely able to transcend this excellent conceptual idea. The scenes the filmmaker captured during shooting aren’t as striking, interesting, or even juicy as he would have hoped. There’s an attempt to approach a burlesque style that would observe the triviality of human behavior and gently ridicule it in light of a much more serious issue, as perfectly achieved by the Swiss short documentary All Inclusive in 2018. Corina Schwingruber Ilić‘s film is a gem of sarcasm and masterfully critiques mass tourism on a massive cruise ship.
Here, except for a woman slouched in her camper van seat pouring herself a glass of white wine while sporting oversized sunglasses in a style that’s part satisfied, part disillusioned amidst the traffic jam, the film fails to capture any particularly captivating situations.
Thus, it’s the film’s concept that shines. But its execution might not make it memorable.
