Saint’s game

As a prologue to the film, a young man is speaking to us before a blackboard, explaining the meaning of a templum: that is to say, the frame that marked out a sacred space in ancient times. Next sequence: a domestic space, where a young woman’s moves bring to mind devotion. Indeed, Amélie Derlon Cordina examines
in her film the relationship between sacred images, the saints from the title, and gestures. By exploring her own journey and those of four protagonists who are foreigners just like herself (the film takes place in Belgium, the director comes from France, and the actors from Dagestan, Island and Palestine), the film summons up many places of transmission and fabrication of images and bodies, and plays with the many transfers from one place to the next. It moves freely and connects living environments: a theatre stage, photographs, a conference hall, a green screen used by filmmakers to insert images, but also the film itself, as a space for directing and staging. Beyond the mere religious iconography, the film questions the possibility of play, like when two parts don’t exactly fit together, so that they can move freely: an experience of both loss and freedom. Is it possible to free ourselves from the images and gestures that have been passed down to us? The question remains unanswered, paradoxical, just like the cruel fable by Daniil Harms that is told in the film, about a man deprived of his body, and the necessity to get rid of one’s magical attributes, as suggested at the end of the film by Prospero’s epilogue in The Tempest by Shakespeare. (NF)