Festivalmotiv

BRÛLE LA MER – BURN THE SEAThursday, 21 January 2016, 7:00 pm

A film by Nathalie Nambot und Maki Berchache

FR 2014, Super8-16mm > 35mm, 75min

A production by the Paris Super8/16mm Lab Collective 'L'Abominable'

Passports are burning on the sea near Lampedusa. Birth certificates, driving licences, family photos, letters. Nothing may betray the Harraga, the North Africans who enter illegally across the Mediterranean. No piece of paper may fall into the wrong hands and destroy the last spark of hope.
Together with Maki, a young Tunisian migrant, the filmmaker Nathalie Nambot tries to approach the sensitive heart of this life in fracture in depressing and depressingly intensive images. And in a certain sense, their film 'Brûle la mer' rewrites the story of migration. Or, like an enthusiastic reviewer stated: In this film, dreams are blazing.
Guests: Nathalie Nambot and Nicolas Rey (camera) – both members of L'Abominable (Paris) – See also Panel II, Saturday, 23 January 2016, 5:30 pm.  

“Maki, a young migrant Tunisian, who among many others, crossed the sea to Lampedusa after the revolution, said to me one day: ‘History is only written about great people. We don’t exist in it.’  A few months later, we decided to write a chapter of history together.  The result is the filmic essay BRÛLE LA MER (BURN THE SEA), about the paradoxical crossroads between the dynamic energy of an ongoing revolution, the drive to set out for Europe, and the violence of being refused entry. The film seeks that which constitutes the sensitive core of a life at the moment of rupture. That which is tiny, common to us all, far from exoticism, but haunted by the dream, like a call. ” – Nathalie Nambot
Nathalie Nambot is a French theater actress and film director. She studied at Toulouse University and campaigns for illegal migrants fighting against social exclusion and repression. Nambot is part of the L’Abominable film laboratory near Paris.
Maki Berchache was born in Zarzis, Tunisia. He arrived in France just after the fall of Ben Ali. Berchache is the co-author and co-director of BURN THE SEA.

Comments on the film:
'With images of the sea which blend with a sleeping man's face, this soft, rather whispered than yelled activist's work begins. (…) A sleepy revolutionary dreams of the dictatorship, of home, of the insurrection, the escape, the sea. Gestures like this give 'Brûle la mer' its characteristic, other-worldly quality. It's a gentle campaigning with which the film conveys its anger at Europe's handling of the migrants, very cautiously in loosely juxtaposed images and sounds, more of a nudging than a pushing in the direction of a political view. A call to think, to associate.' - Nino Klingler / critic.de

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