La Blessure

LA BLESSURE takes Jean-Luc Nancy’s L’Intrus as a point of departure, transposing its reflections—how to enter a territory?—to the context of the repressive European migration policy. Blandine gets hurt at Roissy Airport, where a group of African migrants are resisting deportation. Her wound becomes the mark of the colonial unconscious that haunts France and has inhabited Klotz and Perceval’s cinema since this pivotal film. The wound—and its cicatrisation—is both a figure and a form, epitomising modes of production based on reciprocity and sharing of phenomenological materiality.
LA BLESSURE sketches out an ethico-political and aesthetic gesture. Perceval wrote the screenplay after meeting asylum seekers and compiling their testimonies. Based on the extended duration of each shot, the re-enactment and retelling of sensory experiences and the tension between sound and image, LA BLESSURE’s formal system reflects the filmmakers suitably engaged relationship. Between documentary and fiction, testimony and fabulation, the film’s rigorous border aesthetics are the result of co-representation; reciprocity between the observer and the observed and mutual reconfiguration of their actions are ensured. (Raquel Schefer)

In the presence of Nicolas Klotz and Elisabeth Perceval.

Elisabeth Perceval, Nicolas Klotz: PARIA (2000), LA BLESSURE (2004), LA QUESTION HUMAINE (2007), LOW LIFE (2011), L’HÉROÏQUE LANDE (2017), FUGITIF OÙ COURS-TU ? (2018), SAXIFRAGES, QUATRE NUITS BLANCHES (2021)