The Blackbird Group
Anton Bialas
France | 2021 | 43 min
World premiere
Language : French
Subtitles : English, French
A group of people lives in a house in a French village where daily life passes in its most ordinary of activities: eating, sleeping, being. Connected to each other by an unbearable existential anguish, they methodically prepare a kind of passage from night to day that could well be the passage from one world to another.
A group of people lives in a house in a French village where daily life is but a succession of ordinary gestures: eating, sleeping, being. Connected to each other by an unbearable existential anguish, they methodically prepare a kind of passage from night to day that could well be the passage from one world to another. Anton Bialas examines a tortured youth, cut off from the world, hyper-focused on their pain. Quietly, he captures the smallest acts that bring them closer to their fatal destiny. Their pain seems inaccessible, yet the eye of the director manages to observe, through precise lighting and ascetic framing—in 1:37—, their faces, bodies and stares into the void. A film about individuals, not characters, a youth haunted by its inner demons, unable to speak, driven to a final irreversible gesture that will allow them to endure the night, in the hope of holding out till daylight. At the end of the film, like a cinephile nod, Jeanne Moreau’s voice singing Absences répétées adds a desperate note while giving meaning to a series of inert and nihilistic actions, of a chilling yet moving simplicity.
Violeta Bava
