FESTINA LENTE

Baya Medhaffar
Combining two contradictory terms in a single phrase is called an oxymoron. Circumventing the obvious, shaking up the logic, proceeding in gusts, claiming the impossible, such is the method that Baya Medhaffar has chosen and, adopting an ancient motto, she makes it clear right from the title: “Make haste slowly”. There are several explanations for this speed proclaimed yet slowed all at once. Her film is mostly made of edited, assembled images from other films; thus, all the emergencies from other works reach a climax here, but as they overlap, they also call for their patient and detailed examination. The dishevelled editing is combined to a superimposition technique that makes scales collide, that associate separated figures and backgrounds, and that ties together in the same frame seemingly unrelated dynamics and lines of forces. Yet again, increased speed on screen and necessary microscopic observation, as if in slow motion. Such are some of the aspects of the oxymoron in Festina Lente, yet it hardly explains why Baya Medhaffar chose to draw on it. Why then? A permanent feature arises in this lively and slow chaos: children. Or rather childhood. Which one? That of all the children on screen, who seem right out of Marcel Schwob’s novel La Croisade des enfants. That of a young and new revolution. That of the director herself, also an actress and a musician, who notoriously played a rebel rock singer (in A peine j’ouvre les yeux by Leyla Bouzid). Being at once a tortoise and a hare is a characteristic of that age when contrariness is not yet the rule, when children wish to learn and to forget, when they remember and they want to make their own rules.
(Jean-Pierre Rehm)