Havarie

37°28.6 North and 0°3.8 East, out in the Mediterranean sea, a few tens of miles off the Spanish coast. A frail little skiff full of men is identified by a cruise liner. Passengers crammed along the passageways are looking while a man is filming the scene. This is the video material, just a few minutes long, that will be shown to us. At once out of time, on hold, punctuated by the coast guards busy commu- nicating, boats and other emergency helicopters, shooting time ends up merging with actual observation – 93 minutes, the time needed for the rescue operation and the film’s duration through which we see unfolding nothing less than terrorism in Algeria during the nineteen-nineties, the Irish conflict and war against Ukraine. While the soundscape, rich with accents and different languages, with shared remembrances as much as with birds singing and the sound of rainfall, opens the film towards the past, the present and the future, our gaze never leaves the boat as it drifts away. A dark spot lost in the blue frame whose silhouettes indis- tinctly detach themselves, carrying within itself all stories – of love, of war, of exile, like an eternal beginning. A starting point whose potential is still not quite fully accomplished for it remains suspended in this special time which Philip Scheffner manages to create. Rarely has a film condensed time and space to such a degree as to show, through a single cinematographic gesture of such relevance and absolute force, the destinies of those who meet in the Mediterranean sea. (CG)