24th Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival
Where the Land Ends
director: Loïc Darses
original title: La fin des terres
country: Canada
year: 2019
running time: 90 min.
synopsis
Québec is the largest Canadian province and the only one with the official language being only French. Modern struggles for Québec’s independence have resulted in two referendum polls which both acknowledged its being a part of Canada. The film explores Québec identity through the perspective of young people who haven’t had the chance to vote in the referendums. It comes up with questions about their relationship to their ancestors, whose traditions had been captured on camera by the documentary filmmaker Pierre Perrault, or whether their previously clear identification has begun losing ground now. In the course of a contemplative journey through the province’s cities and nature, seventeen young people provide their questions and ideas.
“Where the Land Ends is a voice and a space. A voice that I realized I no longer heard, yet that I needed to hear. A space that still lived through some, but which we could no longer inhabit ourselves.” L. Darses
biography
Loïc Darses graduated in filmmaking at UQAM (Université du Québec à Montréal). He turned critical attention to his work already thanks to his first short documentary Elle pis son char (2016) screened at international film festivals in Sundance and Rotterdam.more about film
| director: | Loïc Darses |
| producer: | Colette Loumède |
| script: | Loïc Darses |
| editing: | Philippe Lefebvre |
other films in the section
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Boy of War
Cyprien Clément-Delmas, Igor Kosenko
Germany, Czech Republic / 2018 / 79 min.
section: First Lights
World Premiere
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FREM
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section: First Lights
World Premiere
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Dopamina
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Colombia, Uruguay, Argentina / 2019 / 87 min.
section: First Lights
World Premiere
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Diane Sara Bouzgarrou
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section: First Lights
International Premiere
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Helena's Law
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section: First Lights
World Premiere
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Owner’s Portrait
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Argentina / 2018 / 80 min.
section: First Lights
World Premiere
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Double Me
Felipe Rugeles
Colombia, Spain / 2018 / 80 min.
section: First Lights
European Premiere
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27 Times Time
Annick Ghijzelings
Belgium / 2016 / 73 min.
section: First Lights
International Premiere
Nearly 10 years after the conflict in Georgia, Georgian inhabitants of the Russian-occupied territory are still living in temporary camps, waiting to return home. Their dwellings are cookie-cutter houses. They brought only the few items that they managed to grab from their homes when fleeing from the occupation army. Equally austere, almost as empty as their provisional housing, they live their lives at the mercy of waiting for what is to come. In this meditative documentary, real relics of their past lives, everyday things brought from their original homes, are the most tangible manifestations of the irreversibility of time as measured by losses.
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The Things
Nino Gogua
Georgia / 2016 / 62 min.
section: First Lights
World Premiere
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Mittelmeer
Jean-Marc Chapoulie
France / 2019 / 73 min.
section: First Lights
International Premiere
Mykaela Plotkinova thought of making this poetic, mosaic documentary in a bookshop, when she came across the words of poet Manoel de Barros about “the accent of the place of our origin we carry in our eyes”. She never found the quote again, but in the course of the next few years, she carried out the project with the help of other contributors, mainly the editor C. A. Saquieres. She created a film essay combining reflections on the identity and ethnic roots of several natives of the Brazilian city of Recife, who live abroad, and the images of the places where they live.„I’ve never not felt like a foreigner, but neither did I really know where I came from. Through Foreign Eyes searches for a story that no-one has ever really told me. This film is a must for me. A film that is made to understand life.“ M. Plotkin
Through Foreign Eyes
Mykaela Plotkin
Brazil, Argentina / 2018 / 74 min.
section: First Lights
World Premiere
Tutawa Tuagaek, the ageing leader of the Ãwa, a Brazilian indigenous tribe, is one of the last survivors of the 1973 massacre of Indians in the Amazon jungle. This team of filmmaker-ethnographers records his everyday life in the company of young followers, to whom he is trying to pass on his experiences. The Indian community’s everyday rituals are contrasted with found photographs and video clips that offer rare evidence of the atrocities that Tutawa recounts. Different epochs and visual formats create a continuum that reveals the traumatic history of an oppressed people who have managed to survive despite all odds."The imagination is not only mediator between understanding and sensibility, it has its own dynamism, scheme free, organized bodies, constituted individuals, fixed identities, consolidated psyches."
Taego Ãwa
Henrique Borela, Marcela Borela
Brazil / 2016 / 75 min.
section: First Lights
East European Premiere
