The Silent Run [+leggi anche:
intervista: Marta Bergman
scheda film], the new film by Belgian-Romanian director Marta Bergman, is opening the 25th edition of Cinemamed today, 27 November, following its unveiling in a world premiere at the Cairo Film Festival. Acclaimed in 2019 for her fiction feature film debut, Alone at My Wedding [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
intervista: Marta Bergman
scheda film], which was presented in Cannes’ ACID selection, Marta Bergman also has significant documentary experience. This latest movie of hers is a work of fiction, loosely based on a tragedy which rocked Belgium in 2018: the Mawda affair, revolving around a little two-year-old Kurdish girl who died from a bullet wound after being shot by a Belgian police officer during a fatal car chase. Feeling the pressure, the police force initially insisted that no shots had been fired, before alleging that traffickers had used the child’s body as a human shield.

(L'articolo continua qui sotto - Inf. pubblicitaria)

On screen, it all begins with a sunny, close-up shot of a young and good-looking couple in love. The image is also upside-down. At any given moment, trauma can resurface. Sara (Zbeida Belhajamor) and Adam (Abdal Alsweha) are in their tent, busy creating memories for their little girl, Klara, protected from the hostile and dangerous outside world by a thin orange canvas. This initial scene gives way to a totally different situation: the police hunt which these migrants are subject to. Hailing from Mosul or Aleppo, they end up being shot at on a Belgian motorway. The perspective is split, at this point, between the van carrying the exiled family and the police car, depicting a suffocating car-chase sequence which ends in tragedy. Treated like suspects, the parents are denied the right to accompany their little girl and then to grieve for her. The perspective changes once again, this time focusing on the way the police and justice system manage the situation with terrifying cynicism, both officially and vis-a-vis the media, while the police officer (Salim Kechiouche) who fired the shot finds himself tortured by moral and existential questions relating to his guilt and responsibility.

It was a police officer who pulled the trigger but, ultimately, it was a context of fear and suspicion which made the weapon deadly. He’s at the mercy of a system of which Klara and her family are the primary victims. Exploring almost all of the possible ins and outs of this tragedy, restoring to these victims the parent status they were ultimately denied, observing the cynical defence mechanisms employed by the police force, and questioning the role played by the shooter himself, Marta Bergman - unquestionably aided by substantial documentary material - uses politically powerful fiction to try to understand how this tragedy took place, and helps to move beyond but not stifle any emotion or anger in order to grasp the complex nature of this system which tries to justify the unjustifiable.

The Silent Run was produced by Frakas Production (Belgium), in co-production with Production des Années Lumière (Canada). World sales are entrusted to B-Rated International (France).