Maria Iorio, Raphaël Cuomo
How do you recount the facts of our time? By making a chronicle ? The facts announced here are made up of multiple comings and goings, from one shore of the Mediterranean to another, from yesterday to today. First there is our encounter with Abdelhamid, a worker returning to Tunisia, a guide, witness and companion on this voyage through space and time. His story merges with that of the recent events in the middle of Mediterranean, a common space that has become impassable, a fact embodied by Lampedusa. Beyond these basic yet terrible events loom the recent, ever-increasing border closures and the invisibility of those forgotten souls swallowed up by the sea as they tried to cross it. Far from sensationalising, Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo strive to link image, time and journeys. The images have renewed resonance now, theirs in particular: unseen archive footage from projects filmed in the 2000s, a magnificent Roman mosaic in Sousse and the ambivalent movements of history of which it bears the traces and testament. A journey haunted by ghostly bodies, marked by the insistence of a persistent narrative voiceover which marks hiatuses and the missing, erased or impossible images. The film’s refrain is haunted by the image of a port filmed between dusk and dawn, unfolding the links pulsing with an all but forgotten song hummed by Oum Kalthoum, with a melody in search of itself. Gradually the mage emerges, laid out piece by piece, in between the cracks, just like the splendid ancient mosaic which depicts the sea and its inhabitants, which punctuates the film. It interlaces time and voices in numerous impregnable accents – Sicilian, French, Italian and Arabic. From the mosaic to the melody, these motifs welcome invite the various cycles « in search of the rests between the notes and the intervals which link our time to another, chronicles of that time » as the film’s title suggests.
(Nicolas Feodoroff)