15/02/2011

Michal Aviad’s Invisible [+see also:
trailer
film profile], co-produced by Cologne-based Tag/Traum (which champions "different" films, from documentaries to fiction) and shown in the Berlinale Panorama, opens with a warning: any coincidence with real events is completely intentional. The film is based on events that took place in 1978 and contains real archive footage.

Two Israeli women – Lily, who campaigns for Palestinian rights, and Nira, who is making a documentary about this cause – recognise each other after meeting twenty years ago at a police station, where they had come to identify a serial rapist, nicknamed "the polite rapist” for having forced his sixteen victims to engage in romantic gestures while he sexually abused them.

The signs of their shared trauma are at present "invisible". They are both mothers (of daughters) and have got on with their lives, but they each have different vulnerabilities, even different sexualities. Nothing sets them apart from other women.

Yet, for both these women (and the other victims that Nira traces in the course of her investigation), passing time has not erased everything, unlike the police, who have burned the old files, and the legal system, which released the criminal far too early. Each in their own way, separately then together, they embark on the path of re-remembering.

While the purpose of their actions is ambiguous (they even ask themselves several times what the aim of this painful journey is), the documentation work that it entails ends up becoming an end in itself: as forgetting is unbearable, they must document this story, make a film about it, make real the horror which is not visible on their faces but whose denial is worse than the memory. That’s what the director has decided to do.

At the end of this remarkably sensitive and restrained work, a simple phrase appears: according to the UN, one in five women worldwide will undergo a similar experience.

(Translated from French)