BABYLON

Between the Ras Jdir check-point separating Tunisia and Libya, and the
town of Ben Guerdanne, there isn’t much except open countryside. During
spring 2011, more than a million refugees of various nationalities and
languages flocked to Tunisia, fleeing escalating combats in Libya between
revolutionaries and pro-Gaddafi forces. Only a few weeks after the Tunisian
revolution, a temporary town had to be built in the south of the country in
order to accommodate the refugees as quickly as possible.
The three directors, Ismaël, Youssef Chebbi and Ala Eddine Slim have chosen
to bring their cameras to the building site. Not “to cover” the event, as
journalists put it, but rather to discover it while it was happening, almost as
disconcerted as the people it was happening to. We get to see the whole
operation, from installation to demolition. The early stages of the work, the
digging, the pulling up of the first tents, the international media, the NGOs,
the military, and then the refugees, in this particular case, men only. Life
slowly settles. People eat, take their minds off things with dance, music or
sport, and they pray. There are also tensions, frictions. Until finally, the
migrants move again and the town gets packed. The directors made a
decisive choice: there aren’t any subtitles, despite the babelization of
languages, suggested by the title. We can only rely on images, without the
deceitful comfort of commentaries or translations, which would have made
us think that we understood or shared something at this stage of ongoing
exodus. (NF)