Stephanie Barbey and Luc Peter of Intermezzo Films (a firm which is also producing the work in question) have taken an unprecedented and unexpected approach to the making of their latest movie, Broken Land [+lire aussi :
bande-annonce
fiche film]. For whilst the reality documented by the two Swiss directors is undeniably concrete, the repercussions it has on the people who experience it on a day-to-day basis are universal, encompassing fear and refusal all the way through to compassion. But rather than aspiring to investigative journalism, Broken Land is a laboratory scrutinising feelings and human reactions.

The specific territory explored by Barbey and Peter is the border between the USA and Mexico, that immense strip of land flanked by a wall which separates the two countries psychologically even more so than physically. Broken Land explores the daily life, the, at times, absurd routine of a small community of Americans who are forced to live on dehumanised land, delineated by a border which, despite being created under the pretext of protecting them from unbridled illegal immigration, slowly and paradoxically turns into a prison for them. The wall was born out of the simple (and simplistic) idea of stopping Mexican immigrants crossing into the USA, but it soon takes on unexpected dimensions, impacting the lives of those on the “lucky” side far more than ever imagined.

The idea of focusing primarily on the lives of the people the government is supposedly protecting, rather than on the lives of those who are trying to escape their reality, results in an especially interesting, uncomfortable and worrying perspective on confinement. The repercussions of the wall on those living in the USA, who have to live with it every single day of their lives, are manifold, from the fear which drives some of them to spy compulsively on their so-called enemies, watching their every move in line with a militia-style modus operandi (comprising infrared surveillance cameras and a variety of gadgets), to the compassion (tinged with do-goodery) which drives others to scatter provisions in the desert in the hope of saving immigrant lives.

The people’s reactions are all very different, but the thread binding them all together is a blind and irrational fear which descends into full-scale paranoia, as if even the “goodies” had been turned into lab rats by the presence of the wall, trapped in their cages and spinning round in circles. Some of them fear an invasion by an army of shadows (like the ones captured on surveillance cameras), while for others, the so-called rebels, the distressing traces left by neighbours on the run - tattered clothing, human bones – are the real source of terror. In both cases, people’s reactions are trigged by the impossibility of validating their fears. The only visual sign we have of the so-called invaders is the traces they leave behind them. It’s impossible to make any contact with them, and it’s this segregation, this disinformation, which gives rise to an ancestral fear and a collective paranoia of almost apocalyptic proportions.

Broken Land is distributed worldwide by Deckert Distribution.