Vandeweerd’s Lost Land to screen at Visions du Réel
The Visions Du Reel Film Festival, known for its sharp and relevant programming of documentary films, will run this year from April 7-13 in Nyon, Switzerland.
In the past few years, it has regularly screened Belgian productions. Audiences have had the chance to discover Marlène Rabaud and Arnaud Zajtman’s Kafka in the Congo, Jawad Rhalib’s The Damned of the Sea, Thierry Michel’s Katanga Business [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Alain de Halleux’s Nuclear NTR: Nothing To Report and Patric Jean’s Wall to Wall: Berlin to Ceuta.
This year, besides short and medium-length films including Maëlle Grand Boissi’s Pêle-Mêle, Hugues Le Paige’s Le Prince et Son Image and Tao Told Me by Léo Médard, the festival will show Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd’s latest documentary feature, Lost Land, which was presented in the Berlinale Forum in February.
With a 2,400km wall built by the Moroccan army running across it, the Western Sahara is today divided into two parts, one occupied by Morocco, the other controlled by the Western Sahara Liberation Front. Enclosed within a triangle of desert following the massacres perpetrated by the Moroccan army in the 1970s, the Western Saharan people live in a state of repression, pride and resistance.
Based on stories of escape and exile, endless waiting, of halted and persecuted lives, from both sides of the wall, Lost Land shows the everyday life of the Western Saharan people, films their territory and reveals how they are imprisoned in one another’s dreams.
The film was made in two phases with images shot in Super 8, onto which were superimposed landscapes and sound extracts recorded afterwards. It gives voice to the unheard, in the same vein as the director’s other work (Drowned In Oblivion [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Closed District).
Lost Landis produced by Cobra Films, which specialises in documentaries and is a loyal partner of the director, in co-production with Zeugma Films and Arte, with backing from the Belgian French Community and the Brussels Audiovisual Centre.
(Translated from French)
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