Wild Blue: notes à quelques voix

For seven years, Thierry Knauff collected film images all over the world. Images of untold beauty and images of intolerable cruelty. He wove them into a cinematographic essay about the contradictions between good and bad in people. Wild Blue, notes à quelques voix is a poetic, experimental documentary, without music, script or clear narrative line. In his film, Knauff only uses women’s voices. Voices from different countries tell in their own languages about the murder and tortures in their own country. There are beautiful shots of master-drummers from Burundi while we hear a woman recite apparently calmly about numbers of corpses in mass graves. Another extreme is a sequence in which we follow the vicissitudes of a letter up to the dramatic climax.It looks as if the film-maker himself also puts his ear to the ground and takes the room to allow the idea of good and evil to sink in. And the viewer does that with him, as with the pictures of happy children in a sandpit at the foot of a Nazi anti-aircraft bunker in Vienna, that is still standing in the year 2000. The result is miraculous: Knauff does not just charm us while we are in the cinema, because once you get outside, you seem to see more than before and to hear more too. As if we have been woken from a hypnotic state in the cinema.It is planned that several older short films by Knauff will be screened first.