Review: L' homme-vertige: Tales of a City
- Malaury Eloi Paisley’s documentary presents with courage and poetry the daily life of a forgotten humanity fighting to survive

L' homme-vertige: Tales of a City is the first feature from Guadeloupe-born filmmaker and visual artist Malaury Eloi Paisley. Initially trained in art history and musicology at the Sorbonne and then in directing in Guadeloupe (Ateliers Varan) and in Cuba (EICTV), Malaury Eloi Paisley went back to live in her homeland in 2016, where she shot her first short film Chanzy Blues. Increasingly drawn to documentary cinema as a powerful medium to observe and explore the human condition, the filmmaker decided to transcribe into images the daily life of those who have been forgotten by a society that only thinks about profit. Thus began her long period of research on the city of Pointe-à-Pitre that would last a good five years, and which materialises now in the feature film L' homme-vertige: Tales of a City, presented as a world premiere at the Berlinale Forum, and projected more recently at the Black Movie Festival in Geneva.
L' homme-vertige: Tales of a City is a portrait at once hyper-realistic, powerful and poetic of a humanity whose right to exist has been taken away. The director presents characters who are fighting for their dignity in a world that has become hostile, a world based on rules they don’t know and simply no longer wish to follow. The nerve centre of the whole film is Pointe-à-Pitre, a ghostly place where time seems suspended. The characters that inhabit it try to find their way in a territory wounded by protests and repression, a paradoxically twilight territory despite the blinding sun that warms the earth.
Over five years, the filmmaker met and filmed various characters in emblematic places in the city and it is thanks to these very encounters that she tries to reconstruct the story of her country. A former French colony and now an overseas department, the Guadeloupe seems to confess its own guilt and fears through the tales of its inhabitants, through their bodies floating through the streets or the walls of crumbling palaces that split the sky. The characters in L' homme-vertige: Tales of a City seem trapped in a labyrinthine city that swallows them up and pushes them out into the abyss. The lived experiences, the collective memory they are guarding, have turned into a burden, a weight that consumes them inside and with which they don’t know what to do anymore. Through her gaze, at once respectful and powerful, the director tries to give again meaning to these fragmented memories that arise from the depths. If this collective memory were to disappear, an entire people would lose their history.
L' homme-vertige: Tales of a City is the portrait without concessions of a collective vertigo, of the slow loss of points of reference in a world changing too quickly, without caring how many people have shaped its essence. The characters that populate Malaury Eloi Paisley’s documentary are the very soul of Pointe-à-Pitre, workers, revolutionaries or simply human beings who, even if wounded, are rebelling against changes that have become monstrous.
The abyss of the city seems to suck them in, victims in spite of themselves of the chaos of the world, of laws based on profit rather than humanity. The characters filmed by the director become an integral part of a memory that can no longer be lost, of a collective scream suffocated for too long. With great respect and empathy, Paisley films the tired but not yet resigned bodies of these forgotten people, giving back their voice and dignity to alternative paths made of struggle and pain, but also tenderness and hope. L' homme-vertige is a precious film that transforms cinema into a militant act.
L' homme-vertige: Tales of a City was produced by Athénaïse.
(Translated from Italian)
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