Rarely has the release of new films have been able to crystallize as significantly the strange relationship that cinema maintains with news. Inevitably out of step with the immediate, he drops to echo him, with distortions which can depend on the case being enlightening and moving, beneficial in one way or another.
Thus, of two films that release this Wednesday, June 18, both inhabited not by “war”, but by very specific wars, wars which always belong to the present, even if others also occupy the front of the political and media scene, while still others are excluded.
The singular intelligence of the film system is largely due to the assembly process, one of the major resources of which is to put disjoint elements, deemed incomparable or heterogeneous. This is also what these two films brought together by their release date, one vis-à-vis the other and together with regard to the news.
No question of comparing the war in progress in Ukraine with what the North Irish conflict was, even less to the way in which its traces persist-understood, in the news, with the racist riots in the Unionist districts of Northern Ireland, since Monday, June 9. And there is no question of comparing any of these conflicts with the genocide in progress in the Gaza Strip, or the extension of the war in the Middle East by Israel, from Syria to Lebanon and now to Iran.
But there is indeed an assembly effect, which would be singular and enlightening in the proximity of the two films, and is infinitely dramatized by the news – including by the ways in which Sudan or the DRC, atrocious war theaters, are absent. Since there is also a question of visibility, memory, inscription or not in imaginations, which also upset people’s lives and, in many cases, kill them.
Small mowed documentary done by hand in a case, comedy hard rap Crazy in the other, we seem far from works to the measurement and in the tone of the tragedies in progress, or those of yesterday always badly extinct.
Without prejudging the effects and benefits of more imposing forms, there are however in these indirect and modest approaches to understanding resources, questions and emotional investment in connection with dramas, which take paths that only films can spawn.
And, chance or necessity, Voyage on the verge of war And Kneecap eventually converge around the importance of culture – artists’ rolle in Ukrainian resistance, importance of language in republican affirmation in Northern Ireland – in current fights, when the crash of arms and the blood of the victims threaten to overwhelm everything. Again, do not overestimate the importance of this cultural dimension. But do not let it hide.
“Travel by the war”, by Antonin Peretjatko
First a somewhat anecdotal prologue on a trip through Russia made a few years earlier by the French filmmaker Antonin Peretjatko. It is used to install a tone, made of humor and naivety, which will color the film itself, composed from two trips to Ukraine, a few weeks after the Russian invasion, then nine months later.
It is rare that a director begins by presenting the tool with which he will film, a fortiori that he states the reasons for the choice. But this is how truly begins Voyage on the verge of warin a doubly convincing way. By explaining the choice of film and a 16 mm camera, Antonin Peretjatko simultaneously explains many of the formal choices of the film and the state of mind in which he made it, in a methodical quest to escape the stereotypes of the report on Ukraine at war.
Accompanying Andrei, a Ukrainian teacher who, after having fled his country in front of the hordes of Vladimir Putin, must return briefly to his home, the French director sets out in search of the place where his grandfather once lived, who had exiled a hundred years earlier.
With the small sewing machine of his Bolex, he repaired Andrei’s trajectory, on the way to recover business and bring the fruits of a collection of solidarity, the testimonies on daily life in the cities and villages crossed, between playful or ironic and true dramas, a reflection on the function of artists in society – and in the time when it is attacked – and questioning
Way, in the spring in the immediate spring after the invasion and then in winter when the war settled, this DIY claimed by the director discovered in 2013 with the joyful fiction The girl of July 14 Allows a singular approach to the situation in the country attacked by Russia.
Known factual elements, whose atrocities at Boutcha and destruction of residential buildings, and unpublished glimpses are reconfigured each other. This is due to the director’s quirky manner to meet his interlocutors, then tell it in a voiceover, as well as the possibilities of shooting the 16 -spring camera.
In passing, he is a salutary criticism of the quest for origins, this contemporary poison which infuses communitarianisms and nationalisms. Lightly, even if he does not borders anything from the violence that Ukraine undergoes, that men, women, children, landscapes and cities undergo, memories and dreams, Voyage on the verge of war Diszug the identity obsession, beneficent and extremely rare operation.
“Kneecap”, by Rich Peppiatt
Voice also, humor too, but not at all the same tone, the same rhythm with this first film speedy devoted to the North Irish rap group which gives it its title. To the always glowing embers of the confrontation between Republicans and Loyalists, the Irishman Rich Peppiatt ignites a false biopic of two of the members of the trio, in their own role, while the third enters the scene with a pretext of fiction.
We also find, in the romantic role of the father of one of the members of Kneecap, a republican fighter of the previous generation living in hiding, Michael Fassbender, who forever brings the role of Bobby Sands, the leader of IRA on end of terminal hunger in terminal hunger in terminal hunger Hunger by Steve McQueen (2008).
The two lads of Naoise and Liam, their troubles with the cops, with their families, with suppliers and customers of the substance trafficking they sell and consume, with the members of IRA mobilized against the presence of drugs in Catholic districts, as with the Unionist activists nourish the sprint to lose breath that Kneecapthe film, in symbiosis with the music and the presence on stage of Kneecap, the group.
The machete assembly and the stuffy inscriptions that tag the screen make the film a sort of military trailer for the energy of the Belfast group and its concerts that are both committed and explosive.
The stripped energy of the production, the mixture of disrespect for the codes of the classical political film and taking into account the reality of always active conflicts, especially around the use of the language (Kneecap sings in Gaelic, a long prohibited or marginalized language in Northern Ireland) produce unique tension between show and criticism, including protagonists and their practices.
Under his damn appearance and beyond the disheveled discharge he transmits, the film is more complex than it seems. It encourages questions, which are not limited to the only North Irish case, especially around the possibilities and forms of the transmission of a long-term fight between members of different generations and legitimate means to lead it.
