05/02/2026 - Socrates Saint-Wulfstan Drakos crafts a magnetic essay film that turns exile, repression and bureaucratic violence into a haunting cinematic experience

Premiering in the Tiger Competition of this year’s IFFR, Unerasable! is a work of essay filmmaking that wears its urgency on its sleeve, while steadily drawing the viewer into a deeply personal odyssey. Helmed by the pseudonymous Socrates Saint-Wulfstan Drakos, the film announces from the outset that names, images and even memories are not neutral terrains, but sites of control, erasure and survival.

The premise is laid out with disarming clarity. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and over the decades that followed, the regime tightened its grip on civil liberties, justifying repression and systemic violence in the name of “national survival”. From there, the film follows a filmmaker (whose identity is never disclosed), an independent artist and pro-democracy activist, as he is tortured and forced to flee the country in 2018. There begins a years-long journey of displacement that takes him through Thailand and eventually to Sweden. Enemies are many, allies are rare but vital - among them, there are democracy activist and writer Phạm Thị Đoan Trang and dissident Mother Mushroom - while the most enduring battles are fought both externally and within.

Gradually but compellingly, Unerasable! exerts a magnetic pull. Its voice-over - at times raw and visibly wounded, at others lucid, restrained and analytical - guides the viewer through an outer world that often feels “more real than real”. The essayistic structure allows for digressions, hesitations and returns, mirroring the instability of a life lived under constant threat. Rather than offering a linear account of persecution and escape, the film builds an emotional and political landscape in which fear, anger, hope and exhaustion coexist.

Drakos weaves together blurred observational footage, fragments of everyday life, and a striking use of archival material of varying provenance. Notably, scenes of torture and violence are recounted through clips from older, sometimes barely recognisable films: damaged reels, faces blurred beyond identification, images chemically altered or tinted, as if history itself were decaying before our eyes. This strategy not only protects identities, but transforms memory into a haunted cinematic palimpsest.

Reality, in Unerasable!, gradually mutates into something closer to a horror tale - not through sensationalism, but through accumulation. Bureaucracy, surveillance and displacement become mechanisms of contemporary terror. The film’s alienating, yet captivating, form fully embraces the kind of brave, radical and audacious filmmaking one expects from a strong Tiger Competition title: hard-hitting, uncompromising, and far more interested in opening questions than offering comfort.

The final sequence, set entirely in Sweden, is steeped in melancholy and isolation. Living in the countryside, surrounded by snow, darkness and hostile weather, the filmmaker struggles to connect with locals and fellow language students. Communication falters, days stretch endlessly, and at times he feels like the last human being left on earth. The West, imagined as a space of freedom, reveals its own forms of control and loneliness.

Towards the end, the film turns inward with a poignant reflection on stripped-away identity. Forced to live under a false name, the filmmaker reflects on the possibility of reclaiming his stolen self, perhaps through cinema itself, by imagining a future film about refugees as a means of restoring their names, their histories and their dignity.

All in all, Unerasable! is an essay film at its finest: politically incisive, formally daring, unexpectedly laced with a few dry, fleeting moments of humour, and deeply humane. It is a work that feels destined for a strong festival run and, hopefully, for arthouse distribution - a film that insists on being seen and remembered, while actively resisting erasure.

Unerasable! is produced by Belgian company Cinemaximiliaan.