Lost Land (2011) Territoire perdu

Director: Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd
Writer: Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd

A quotation from Herodotus situates the film in a mythical dimension with a dizzying viewpoint. The images seem fragile, as if they were reaching us after surviving the sinking of time. Sound invades them with its inevitable presence. The voices reminisce on past events. The Saharawi people were there. They are there. They are resisting. Stirred by a dark and slow rhythm, overwhelmed by the noise of a wind that never stops, the film recalls the spirit of these biblical curses that condemned human beings to confront their own mortality. From this sensation, Territoire perdu brings the plight of an invisible people to the world's attention, a plight that could easily be forgotten in the cynicism of geopolitics. To immortalise the men and women of the Saharawi people, the Belgian filmmaker paid two completely secret visits to this no-man's-land in which they are confined: once to film them in Super 8, and again to record the ambient soundscape and their voices. The result is a grainy, haunting and hypnotic film. A film lost in a trance, which gives a face to the invisible and a voice to those who have never been heard.

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