Jericho, A film by Tamara Erde.
30 min. HD
Production: Le Fresnoy Studio national des Arts Contemporaines
Director of Photography: Gaetane Rousseau
Music: Yann Leguay
It's been a long time that I've been meaning to make a film about "war", to understand it within me, not to leave it there, between "their" shadows, as it has always been.
One day, in New-York, I find a postcard. A green cheaply paper with a print of black trees. I call it "The dark forest" and start a long journey within me, a journey after the black forest inside me.
The black forest is very strong, very present, and yet always afar, almost stranger. Slowly I understand that the forest is my war. That same war, so close and yet unfamiliar. Like a big brother or parent, you grow up with, for years, and then one day you understand that you didn't know him at all although he was there all the time, this is what I felt about war after living most of my life in Israel.
I began by writing a script about that "Black Forest" I've mentioned, but when it was done, making the film seemed pointless. Then I went on and wrote a few other scripts around that theme, but always felt that they remained far from the theme, that my research is still far from its end.
When moving to Europe I began to look for my war, my forest, in many different places and mediums, while in all of them the impossibility of my process, the tension between this theme which was so close to me and all together so far and unclear, kept interesting me.
Slowly, the story I' telling in Jericho began to join, through fragments of my journey, my references, my memories.
I constructed it all around the forest, the "dark forest", the forest of shadows, of the camps of "that" war that was always around, until one day I went back to visit in Israel. Then, I happened to go to the city of Jericho. Standing there, at the point that lays between the open desert and the checkpoint at the entrance of the city to which I can not enter, between Saer, a palestinian young shepherd, and the army vehicles filled with soldiers, I could feel that "war" I was looking for. It was a very specific point, little point, and then the light changed a bit and it was already far, that point, only a memory. And I was left with it, the small point of the close desert, and the big dark forest from afar, and there, between those two, I've placed my war.
I took great pleasure in creating the impossible meeting between the three women creators, each of them, serving me to discuss another aspect of this process of impossible creation, of this war, this abstract and yet present war that wears various forms. And then, the other relations interwoven between the director and each of the other characters - the driver who both brings her to her meeting point with her actor, approaches her to her movie, as well as keeps her away from it, arouses her doubts, her uncertainties, the actor who awaits for her, who comes from close to her war point in Jericho, into her big forest, getting lost, presenting her abstract philosophical journey through his concrete movements, and his physical presence, and finally Nadir - the illusional "phantom" figure who attaches the story of the drier to the inner thoughts and visions of the director, a symbol of the silence which is to come at the end, that remains.
"Jerciho" is a movie describing a one-day journey of a director going to the meeting point with her actor.
The director, who has set up to meet him at a forest which is her aspiration for the theme of her film, hasn't yet a clear idea of the film she's about to make, but she knows it'll be around her ideas of "war".
She has come from Israel to Europe, having a strong urge to make this creation around this theme which is very strong and present for her, but is yet very abstract and unclear in her head.
She sets up to meet an actor which for her has a relation to this issue, in the forest. She prepares some texts of Duras, written around the second world war, and she intends to try and have her idea clearer when meeting him there.
But, on her way, she develops a special relation with the driver who's riding her to the forest. He starts questioning her about her movie, and when tells her a story of a drive he had twenty years ago in Vienna, when he took three important creators to a concert in the Mozarteum. Those women were Marguerite Duras, Pina Bausch and Nadir, a young Palestinian violinist who was about to play at the concert.
By quoting from their conversation which was kept well in his memory, the driver arrises issues regarding creation and the creative processes as were expressed by those three women at that drive.
Step by step the director is becoming more interested in the driver's story and point of view, and her doubts and thoughts around this movie she's on her way to make, are becoming more and more present.
In parallel to the journey of the director and the driver during this day, we also see the actor, who's coming to the forest much earlier, in the morning, and passes the day at the forest, waiting for the director to arrive. The actor in his wonders around the forest, in his movements that are becoming more and more of a dance then everyday actions, represents the internal and intellectual processes that the director is going through during that day.
When the evening comes they are finally arriving at the forest. By that time the director knows that for her this film is impossible, that for her the war is closer to the silence of Nadir then to any film she'll make.
"Ou bien c'etait une autre annee. Un autre ete. Un autre jour sans vente. La mer etait bleue, meme la sous nos yeux, et il n'y avait pas de vagues mais une houle extremement douce, une respiration dans un sommeil profond.
...Lui se leve et il a avance vers la mer. Je suis venue pres du bord. Je l'ai regardais. Il a vu que je le regardais...On entend toujours les joueurs. Robert L., lui, on ne l'entend toujour pas. C'est dans ce silence-la que la guerre est encore presente, qu'elle sourd a travers le sable, le vent".
(M. Duras, "La Douleur")
Actors:
Hande Kodja
Gianfranco Poddighe
Yousef Sweid
Ephia Gburek
