I really wanted to love this unusual piece of North African cinema, from debut Tunisian feature filmmaker Ala Eddine Slim. It is the story of a sub-Saharan migrant who chooses to depart Europe for Africa, only to end up lost in a forest in which he seems to quite literally become one with his environment.
Amine Messadi's cinematography captures light and shade beautifully and manages to merge the human characters with their environment so successfully that the nocturnal scenes become like a fugue. It has clear antecedents in the cinema of Pedro Costa, and its unnerving magical realist bent, is very similar to Damien Manivel's wonderful minimalist romance LE PARC, released in the same year.
Frustratingly, the film really labours through its formalism, with idiosyncratic flourishes that seem overly pretentious - such as the framing of the language designs, which disappears from the film early on, despite seeming like a key organising aspect of the narrative. It is hard to make sense of the lack of verbal interaction between the two central characters, as even if languages are different, you would still try to articulate something, surely. Overall this felt like a bold experiment in colour that didn't have the narrative or the dynamic action to maintain audience interest for the long haul. That said, it did feature a wonderful sequence when the main character is trapped in a hole in the ground.
Amine Messadi's cinematography captures light and shade beautifully and manages to merge the human characters with their environment so successfully that the nocturnal scenes become like a fugue. It has clear antecedents in the cinema of Pedro Costa, and its unnerving magical realist bent, is very similar to Damien Manivel's wonderful minimalist romance LE PARC, released in the same year.
Frustratingly, the film really labours through its formalism, with idiosyncratic flourishes that seem overly pretentious - such as the framing of the language designs, which disappears from the film early on, despite seeming like a key organising aspect of the narrative. It is hard to make sense of the lack of verbal interaction between the two central characters, as even if languages are different, you would still try to articulate something, surely. Overall this felt like a bold experiment in colour that didn't have the narrative or the dynamic action to maintain audience interest for the long haul. That said, it did feature a wonderful sequence when the main character is trapped in a hole in the ground.