February 24, 2022: Russian troops are flooding into Ukraine. After the initial shock, how do you respond? For Marine Hugonnier, it was by using her own weapons – film and images – driven by what she describes as, “a desire to create a common front and a common image”. This is her declared agenda. She takes a two-pronged approach, first travelling to the Polish border and filming once she arrives. Then, transporting supplies to Kyiv. So, the film opens with grainy black and white 16mm images of a familiar but contradictory world: a random railway station, but a station that also conjures up all the iconic images of exoduses in European history, of which there are sadly so many. Inside the dimly-lit station at night – the camera is placed in the middle of a crowded corridor. A bustling crowd – mostly women and children – gestures and a brouhaha which resonate like a single voice. The film unfolds from his central point, from one encounter to the next, story to story, told by refugees and those who have come to help them. It finds its strength in the shots of faces, composed almost like portraits. Faces and their stories; the decision to remove them allows us both to both to listen and pay close attention. These figures seem suspended between the power of their words and the obstinate physical presence of their bodies there: like the young female doctor who has decided to return to Ukraine to care for the sick, or the young man who has come to fight. Creating a common image therefore consists of leaving an imprint on the film with the camera like a “body projected in the present”. Despite the fact these images were shot in March 2022, the troubling paradox is that they already seem to bear the weight of history. This is like a frozen moment, at the point when the war had only just become a threat rather than a reality crushing both bodies and the landscape.
(Nicolas Feodoroff)Marine Hugonnier