28th Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival
Also Known as Jihadi
director: Eric Baudelaire
original title: Also Known as Jihadi
country: France
year: 2017
running time: 101 min.
synopsis
This conceptual documentary, inspired by Masao Adachi’s famous 1969 film Ryakushô renzoku shasatsuma (A.K.A. Serial Killer), is based on landscape theory, whose proponents strive to capture in art the environmental influences that help to form ones’ personality, and the effect that specific locations have on an individual’s life. The film’s director uses this approach to dissect the path followed by a young Frenchman of Algerian descent from his native country to Syria and back again – a path from a secure social position to radicalism and ruin. Without even once showing us the protagonist, he builds an overall picture of him using a series of shots consisting of streets, beaches, buildings, and text from written records made during investigations and interrogations.
„Fûkei means landscape in Japanese. Fûkeiron is a proposition: turn the camera 180 degrees to film not the subject of the film, but rather the landscapes that he has seen.” E. Baudelaire
biography
Eric Baudelaire (1973) was born in Salt Lake City. He currently lives in Paris where, in addition to film, he devotes his time to photography and the visual arts. His feature film debut – The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years without Images (2011) – was dedicated to the members of the radical leftist group known as the Japanese Red Army. You may have seen one of his other films, Letters to Max (2014), at the Ji.hlava IDFF.more about film
| director: | Eric Baudelaire |
| producer: | Olivier Marboeuf, Eric Baudelaire, Alexandra Delage |
| photography: | Claire Mathon, Alan Guichaoua |
| editing: | Claire Atherton |
| sound: | Oguz Kaynak, Maxence Dussere, Nicolas Becker, Philippe Welsh |
