Reflective Encounters

“While the opening credits are still running, we can already feel a dark aural atmosphere taking shape. The first image jumps out at us like a bomb, a deflagration with its yellow-orange flames. This abstract imagery persists, as if surrounded by a blur, travelling backwards and calling upon memory and recollection, while the narrative appears in voice-over. This backwards movement continues throughout the film, diving into an imaginary space of constellations, of stardust, of trying to rebuild and form a whole again.

Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis creates a world in which abstraction gradually gives way to concreteness and emotion without ever provoking or imposing it. Through the reconstructed story of a woman who experienced the Maalbeek subway attack in Brussels in 2016, we witness the gentle passage of time, the time it takes to come to grips with the shock of such a brutal, unexpected and barely explicable event, which would seem to be fictional... Yet, here, everything is real and the cinematographic medium plays a key role in allowing this reality to exist – whether through visual experimentations or archival images. Maalbeek discusses the role of memory and recollection: is it better to remember a traumatic event as a means of overcoming the shock? Or is it better to be left with no memory and risk facing the abysmal emptiness of the mind and the struggle to reconstruct yourself? What remains are the traces, like the dust, blur, and fine hail that litters the image. Traces, these incomplete and sometimes undefinable memories.”

— Florian Fernandez