You are here: The Space Program
A movie theater is a place. That sounds obvious, but it’s worth remembering that a cinema is basically a room you enter to wait in the dark with strangers (and maybe a couple of friends), to sit and watch. In fact, it is the goal of many movies to help you escape the outside world and forget where (or even who) you are. One beautiful exception to this rule is Victor Moreno’s documentary The Hidden City, a mind-bending tour of the tunnels and other underground systems that support a city. Plunging the audience into darkness, The Hidden City makes you feel the movie theater around you as an unlit space, as if continuous with the screen.
The Hidden City is just one film in Space, a focus program this year at IDFA, and it’s a particularly vivid example of how certain films map out a space, whether explicitly or in your mind’s eye. Spectacularly immersive, The Hidden City charts abstract spaces of dark and light as the camera peers down vertiginously deep tunnels, but it also makes you feel the concreteness of these spaces with juddering views of workers tirelessly drilling into the walls. Like The Hidden City, the selections in Space are very concerned with the ways in which human beings project ourselves onto the world—physically, politically, psychologically, socially, intellectually—and vice versa. Nicole Vögele’s Closing Time, for example, observes the activity at a corner of a Taipei neighborhood, tuning into the nocturnal rhythms of the noodle cooks, customers, dogs. It’s both intensely local and universal in showing the human routines through which people make a space their own, even against the backdrop of a sprawling, turbulent, global city.
In our difficult times, almost every space is a contentious one, something to fight over, or to keep people out of. It’s no coincidence that several films in Space center upon global migration, in an era when at least 65 million people are displaced (according to United Nations estimates). These “border films” show another collision between the conceptual—the manmade fiction of national borders—and the backbreaking lived experience of migrants, who are uprooted from home, away from familiar sights, smells and spaces. Karim Aïnouz’s Central Airport THF chronicles how Syrian refugees in Germany have been temporarily housed in a former airport, a gateway to Berlin once championed by Adolf Hitler. Airports are a prime “nowhere space” of modernity, even if this one is efficiently partitioned and politely staffed; the voice-over of one young Syrian man is our guide through the ups and downs of the experience. Even in these forgettable, banal surroundings, he begins to have trouble remembering details of his homeland. Something has been replaced by nothing, at least until he feels truly resettled. Deep senses of loss are also felt in Ektar Mittal’s Absence, about Indian laborers who travel to cities for work, their plight reflected and refracted in lyrical ways.
Taking the notion of space in new directions, Gabrielle Brady’s Island of the Hungry Ghosts largely adopts the perspective of a therapist, Poh Lin, who treats immigrants in Australia. These traumatized travelers are quarantined, seemingly indefinitely, on the (cruelly named) Christmas Island, which exists in the film primarily as an unseen forsaken place. A deeply caring woman, the therapist encourages her patients to open up their feelings in the safe space of her office; on the table in front of them is a small sandbox with figurines, a therapeutic area for working through feelings, or letting the mind wander. Yet Island of the Hungry Ghosts also follows Poh Lin when off-duty, offstage as it were, living and playing with her two young daughters and husband, somewhat distracted and worn down by her work. As a grimly ironic parallel, the director includes scenes of migrating red crabs, seemingly better protected by law, as they inexorably trek across the island.
Christmas Island is mentioned in another film in Space, The Border Fence, Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s look at an Austrian border town that’s clamping down on immigration with a new fence and new procedures. Here, too, we get a sense of how displacement and its emotional toll has a way of radiating outward, creating a kind of hot zone of trauma fed by fear and indifference. Elsewhere on the planet, Sergei Loznitsa—the rare kind of ambidextrous filmmaker acclaimed for both his fiction and his nonfiction—examines another kind of contested ground by observing celebrations at Berlin’s Soviet War Memorial in Victory Day. There’s a powerful sense of the simultaneity of space—the way history stays alive in all its layers and opposing loyalties and cultures, at one and the same time.
Perhaps the greatest span of this program’s ambition comes in two final, wildly disparate films. In Los Reyes, from directors Bettina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff, two stray dogs roam a Santiago skate park that they sweetly treat as their territory, habitat, home and playground. What seems at first a lighthearted juxtaposition of the dogs with adolescent skaters, heard in voice-over, seems to age before our eyes into a truly heartbreaking story of friendship and loss. Devastating in an entirely different way is Guillaume Massart’s In the Open, an audacious film about an island prison primarily for sex offenders. As Massart patiently questions the convicts, our awareness of their horrific crimes seems to permanently shadow the sunny, idyllic Mediterranean environs we see on-screen.
Finally, RaMell Ross’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening is in some ways highly traditional in its geographical rubric, yet it’s a radical record of experience. Ross portrays a stretch of rural Alabama with an intoxicating empathy: using a brisk, impressionistic, ever-surprising style of shooting, he traces the lives of African-Americans in fragments. Instead of telling one life’s story, or following the arc of some endeavor, he seeks to show how they inhabit space, working from gestures and words and moments rather than sequences of action, and thus gets as close as possible to the feeling of being alive in this world. This might mean a long chat about college football in a car, or just watching a toddler run back and forth in a room, or marveling at a bonfire (as a man in turn marvels that he’s bothering to film it). In Ross’s project of total investment in one patch of the world, seeing and feeling the specific realities of African-American experience—the spaces between the spaces—there is not just truth, but grace.
Nicolas Rapold is Editor-in-Chief of Film Comment, the film magazine published by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York. Since 2013, Rapold has been the host of a long-running series at IDFA on the art of documentary filmmaking. He will again be interviewing the filmmakers of the focus program Space, along with Eric Hynes, who is a film critic and curator of the Museum of the Moving Image in New York.
