Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd
France, Belgium | 2022 | 87 min
World premiere
Languages : Armenian, Turkish
Subtitles : French, English
Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd continues his powerful political and poetic body of work with this new film, shot in 16mm, which travels through the regions around Ararat along its “inner lines”, to use the military terminology. These parallel routes are also used by messengers and their carrier pigeons to connect communities scattered by conflict.
In military terminology, Inner Lines are parallel routes near the enemy lines, enabling evasion. Around Ararat, “the white centre” that illuminates “the darkest times”, they are used by messengers and their carrier pigeons to connect the communities scattered by conflict. Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd continues his powerful political and poetic body of work (Les Tourmentes, VdR 2014; Les Eternels, 2016) with this film shot in 16mm between Iraqi Kurdistan, Turkey and Nagorno-Karabakh. Remaining faithful to a formal approach blending the outline of the film-image with the asynchronous sonic off-camera – harrowing testimonies, biblical narrative, whispered secrets, political discourses and rants, close or distant explosions –, he walks alongside Yazidis or Armenians ravaged by the insatiable Moloch of war. Voices bring humanity to bleak landscapes, bodies lean over to listen to age-old stones laden with memories and gazes burn with inextinguishable inner sorrow. Vandeweerd remains the essential and exacting filmmaker-geographer of lost territories.
Emmanuel Chicon
Les Éternels, 2017
Nouménie, 2016
Les Tourmentes, 2014
Lost Territory, 2011
The Sleeping People, 2009
The Dark Circle, 2007
Closed District, 2004
Lost Roots, 2002
Nemadis, Des Années sans nouvelles, 2000
