Footnote

Ein verunsicherter Polizist fragt bei der Zentrale nach: „Political sign on private property – is this a crime?“ Während der ersten Pandemiewochen hört der Filmemacher den schnarrenden Polizeifunk ab. Bewaffnete Raubüberfälle, verdächtige Gestalten bei Supermärkten, Protestmärsche der Black-Lives-Matter-Bewegung und immer wieder verwirrte Odachlose, die versuchen, auf den winterlichen Straßen von Chicago zu überleben. Der Kontrast zu den 23 langen, mithin elegischen Einstellungen, die er aus den Fenstern seiner Wohnung dazu macht, könnte anfangs größer kaum sein. Doch irgendwann verschwimmen die Grenzen; Gewalt und Einsamkeit scheinen die Stadt vollends zu verschlingen. (Stephan Settele)

Seen through a window, all cities can look peaceful. It all depends on location and orientation. Like many filmmakers suddenly trapped in isolation, Zhengfan Yang shot the outside of a neighborhood in Chicago from above, trying to look for traces of what had once been a world and had now become a series of fragments. The images move slowly through the seasons in this small circuit, and the sound does too, but the source we hear can be anywhere at any time: a police scanner recorded during the last year of the Trump administration and the first of the pandemic.
FOOTNOTE tunes into police language in its most literal sense: how people, places and actions are described and how tasks are assigned. Ghosts of the recent past haunt this film (the killing of Gorge Floyd is the first and foremost) while it observes a state apparatus as a phenomenon belonging to a city, to a system, and, as time moves forward, to a country. (Lucía Salas)

Yang Zhengfan: TANGO IN THE STREET (2007, K), THE MAN BEHIND A CAMERA (2009, K), TEN YEARS LATER (2010, K), THE SURROUNDINGS (2011, K), I TRAVEL THROUGH TIME TO MEET YOU AGAIN (2011), DISTANT (2013, DOC), WHERE ARE YOU GOING (2016), LIQUID IMAGE (2017, K), DOWN THERE (2018, K)