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Le Cercle des noyés is the name given in Mauritania to black political prisoners imprisoned from 1987 in the old colonial fortress of Oualata. This film touches on the fragile process of unveiling memories by one of these former prisoners who remembers his story and that of his companions. In a visual echo, the places of their confinement come one after another denuded from any traces of that past.
Guided by the sheepbells of a flock and by the evocations of the lost, this film is a voyage through storms; those of the mountains and winter, those of bodies and souls, those which remind us that which nature has not obtained from our reason, obtaining from our madness.
Straddling a 2,400-kilometer-long wall constructed by the Moroccan army, the Western Sahara is today divided into two sections — one occupied by Morocco, the other under the control of the Sahrawi National Liberation Movement’s Polisario Front. Drawing from stories of flight, exile, interminable waiting and the arrested, persecuted lives on both sides of that wall, this film bears witness to the Sahrawi people, their land, their entrapment in other people’s dreams. In an esthetic that sublimates the real, Lost Land resonates like a score that juxtaposes sonorous landscapes, black-and-white portraits and nomadic poetics.
I travelled across Mauritania to find a tree that I saw from my window in Belgium. It wasn't a mythical tree, but rather one that could be anywhere. On my way, I met men and women who shared their perception of this quest and in doing so, in a roundabout way they shared some of their visions of the world and of existence. For some, my tree was the sign from the spirits, of the invisible or a call from light. For others, it was the symbol of a history, a culture or the end of a period in time. For yet others, it was a tree that you see only when you get lost...
Human beings who have experienced such a strong shock that they are no longer even afraid of death (as it often happens to genocide survivors) sometimes fall into what is known as a feeling of timelessness or a “melancholy”. They live somewhat “outside” time, a mode of extra-temporal existence, waiting for the day on which they will be freed from their suffering. It is the people — almost ghosts having survived the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenians and Azerbaijani that has lasted for almost twenty years — that the filmmaker shows and listens to in his film. Behind them, behind their wandering bodies, behind their frenzies, is what remains of the collapse of the Soviet Union in Caucasus: ruins, uninhabited spaces, tombs, vestiges of war, trenches where soldiers watch for an invisible enemy.
2009 documentary by Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd, set in Belgium, Senegal, the Ardennes and Western Sahara.
Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd continues his powerful political and poetic body of work with this new film, shot in 16mm, which travels through the regions around Ararat along its “inner lines”, to use the military terminology. These parallel routes are also used by messengers and their carrier pigeons to connect communities scattered by conflict.
Documentary depicting the filmmakers' efforts to find a nomadic Mauritanian family they had filmed six years earlier in order to show them the recorded footage.
Documentary about the war in South Sudan.
A documentary about the life and films of director John Ford.