Tinselwood

Film after film, from one geography to the next, Marie Voignier strives to explore territories where imagination, historical layers and present stakes intertwine. With Tinselwood, she comes back to South-East Cameroon, that remote land where she had already shot her film The Mokélé-Mbembé Hypothesis (FID 2011), about explorer Michel Ballot’s obsessive quest for a fantastic beast. Tinselwood immerses us into a tropical forest once coveted by the German then the French colonial powers, whose imprint still shows today. She takes us deep into the thick vegetable mass, sensually reproduced, dominated by the green of the foliage and the red of the soil, with its enveloping and rustling atmosphere. Starting with the meticulous making of a clever if simple trap, the film begins a journey leading to a buried German cemetery, to sorcerers performing votive rituals, but also to lumberjacks working with chainsaws and trucks, all of them filmed with the same mysterious atmosphere. Marie Voignier pays close attention to local customs and beliefs, as well as to the spirit of the place, as she draws patient pictures of what is happening today in this both inhabited and haunted place. The films shows a succession of situations, sometimes re-enacted or developed with interviews shot beforehand, with Marie Voignier always emphasising their complex historicity. Then what slowly appears is a landscape, in all its depth and scope, both delicate and political, made of memories, desires, threats and opportunities, just like the garden we discover unexpectedly at the end of the film. (NF)