25/10/2022 - In Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd’s film, the sound of silence meets a deafening cacophony of voices

It’s almost ironic that Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd’s French-Belgian co-production Inner Lines [+see also:
trailer
film profile], previously shown at Visions du Réel, was handed the Sound Design Award at Norway’s recent Mirage Film Festival (see the news). In so many ways, it’s really about silence – silence or just plain indifference, of the land or the gods, probably tired of witnessing never-ending conflict and pain.

A perfect example of what people tend to call an “essay film”, Inner Lines – shot at the foot of Mount Ararat – is not exactly quiet, however. It includes various testimonies from survivors and exiles, from the Yezidis and the Armenians. They are graphic and relentless, and after a while, they become gruesomely familiar. Maybe that’s why Vandeweerd, burdened with stories of bodies tortured, murdered or missing, escapes into poetry at one point.

It's an understandable, probably much-needed choice. It would be hard for certain viewers to commit to a story that brutal: now, the film feels more melancholic than violent. Inner Lines – brief at its 87 minutes – starts mysteriously, with a caged pigeon left out in the snow, with black-and-white photographs flashing up on the screen only to once again disappear into the darkness, various faces seen yet swiftly forgotten. “I am in the dark, day and night,” someone says. More will experience the exact same feeling.

“In military strategy, inner lines are escape routes located near enemy lines,” it is stated. They can be used by messengers and their carrier pigeons, helping to connect communities lost in the midst of war. But what kind of escape or connection is really possible here, on land so used to the violence that it barely bats an eyelid? That’s another question. Vandeweerd keeps on listing the conflicts and the names. Is it needed? Not really, unless it’s a question of respect or of celebrating the lives that were lost. Maybe it would work in the film’s favour to just fully commit to this dreamier approach, as what he expresses is already clear.

He does something here that many directors do: he shows people just standing still, looking at the camera somewhat accusingly or off into the distance, maybe where their homes used to be. Sometimes teary-eyed, sometimes uncomfortable. They “were at peace like their mountains” once, they say. Until they weren’t.

Instead of “talking heads”, you get thinking heads, with a choir of voices recalling what the people won’t say aloud. It’s not just their testimonies either; it’s tales and old stories, political speeches. But you don’t actually see them speak, and their lips are not moving, as if to show that some secrets remain hidden and some deeds go unpunished. Maybe after so many years, they don’t really expect anyone to hear them.

Inner Lines was produced by Belgium’s Cobra Films and France's Les Films d’Ici Méditerranée. Les Films d’Ici handles the movie’s sales.