The Road Back

Wouters Maurits / Belgium / 2016 / World Premiere / 31 min.

synopsis

The Road Back is a documentary journey to a time and place that have long been considered lost. The main character tries to find a lost village near a former international railway line where his recently deceased mother spent her youth. The past merges with the present as the filmmaker mixes archival films and close-ups of nature with old photographs. In fact, this blending of two media with different relationships to time forms the basis for discovering not only the relicts of the past that lie hidden beneath layers of contemporary phenomena, but also the unstoppable flow of seemingly unchanging time.

“The Road Back incorporates the characteristics of home videos in narrative schemes. In the hope to create a personified and intimate film, based on the directness of home video.”

biography

Maurits Wouters (1986) is a Belgian director and visual artist who experiments with the expressive possibilities of film, video, and photography in order to engage in nostalgic explorations of the landscape of personal and historical memory. His previous films include the short Son (2013), which was dedicated to his sick mother, and The Movement of Phill Niblock (2015), a portrait of the iconic New York avant-garde musician and filmmaker.