Our Quiet Place
Elitza Gueorguieva
France, Bulgaria | 2021 | 68 min
World premiere
Languages : French, Belarusian, English
Subtitles : English, French
Elitza Gueorguieva films the making of the novel that her Belarusian alter-ego Aliona begins about her father, a maritime adventurer, physicist and dreamer, who disappeared off the Turkish coast in 1995. In accompanying this process of loss and emancipation through writing, the filmmaker invents her own visual language amplifying the tension between dream and reality, poetry and memory.
Aliona Gloukhova arrived in France “with two hundred words” that she wants to use to write a novel about the disappearance of her father, a physicist and maritime adventurer, who “turned himself into a dolphin” to escape the Belarusian communist dictatorship, off the Turkish coast, one day in October 1995 after the sinking of his boat. Elitza Gueorguieva, a filmmaker of Bulgarian origin, accompanies her with her camera during this process of bereavement in the form of an investigation into a man who is “neither dead nor alive”, who haunts the limbo of her memory and whom she seeks to meet one last time through another language, a deterritorialised literary space. With knowing delicacy, the film invents its own setting to welcome the fragmentary “dreamed memories” that Aliona gathers together during her her wanderings between Minsk, Barcelona, Paris, Arromanches and Turkey. It constructs a dialogue with two voices, questioning a shared experience which also holds the promise of emancipation through the creative act: “the more we distance ourselves from [our] country, the more we get closer to it through fiction”.
Emmanuel Chicon
Forum 2021
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