Presented last year at Cannes Director’s Fortnight, finally finding its U.S. premiere in San Francisco at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts a couple of weeks ago and released this week in France, The State Of The World (O Estado Do Mundo) is an initiative commissioned by the Gulbenkian Foundation, a Portuguese private institution of public utility whose statutory aims are in the fields of arts, charity, education and science. Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian was a petrol magnate of Armenian origin and also a passionate and prolific art collector. For its 50th anniversary, the Gulbenkian Foundation asked six filmmakers to make a 15-minute film: Pedro Costa (Colossal Youth), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady), Chantal Akerman, Wang Bing (West Of The Tracks), Vicente Ferraz (Soy Cuba, O Mamute Siberiano, which examines the creation and exhibition of Kalatozov’s Soy Cuba) and video artist Aysiha Abraham. In 15 minutes, none of the directors try to make a global diagnosis but to reopen, in present times, a door on the past. It’s for instance a bereavement in Weerasethakul’s quietful Luminous People, the specter of deportations in Costa’s sublime Tarrafal, the primitive memory of totems in the gigantic digital images that float in the air of China in Akerman’s Tombée de nuit sur Shanghaï, or the memory of tortures committed on the opponents to the regime in Wang Bing’s Brutally Factory.
In The State Of The World there are enough beauties to arouse the regular fans interest as well as the curiosity of those who haven’t took a glance yet at these auteurs. Each film works as an autonomous machine, with its proper tools (DV, HD, Super 8 or 35mm), its own speed, its own relation to genres. Costa’s Tarrafal may naturally evoke John Ford and Jacques Tourneur, but it’s mostly the occasion for Costa to carry on with the important yet lightful work that leads to Colossal Youth (read our chronicle from last week) in a story where speech is given back to Cap-verdian immigrants deported by Portuguese Minister of the Interior – we soon realize that these speeches may come from the grave. As always with Weerasethakul, Luminous People is the occasion for a shooting outside the city, an occasion to go on cruise on a river in which the ashes of a father are spread ; blissful moment shot in super 8, without sound, like a home movie directed too late, with no regrets but confidence in the coexistence of the living and the dead. Absolute contrast with Wang Bing’s Brutally Factory. His usual small camera penetrates a disused and monumental factory and in its dust, ghost of tortured and murdered students are being resurrected. Precious disparity: if most of the directors gathered here didn’t try to formalize social or economical situations, each one of has invented a particular rhythm, a particular form, so that the documentary would not get its strength from its subjects but from its images.

Bastien Hader