Constellation (2021)

As an opening, we slowly approach an urban area from above, in an aerial view of unremarkable apartment blocks sparkling in the quiet of the night. Next is the same city in the daytime, looking hollowed-out. A sweet sidestep, such is Dania Reymond-Boughenou's challenging approach as she films the Rougière, a neighborhood in Marseille, beyond the predictable clichés, the social unrest and the picturesque. She aims at filming what is never shown, at capturing what makes the density and the flesh of the place, and at conveying the spirit that enlivens it. Off-screen, we can hear a succession of old memories shared by the inhabitants, like this woman who remembers the shock she felt when she arrived from Algeria, or that man who recalls slices of life from his childhood. Their stories accompany the slow descent of words and memories towards the bodies that we can finally see and hear, at human height. Dania Reymond-Boughenou sets out, in slight touches and successive layers, to film the invisible, like vibrating waves echoing the violence of the stories that are shared, alongside major developments in History - war in Algeria, AIDS in the 80's, or lately the devastating effects of drugs. These are vibrating presences, like the wind shaking tree foliage as shown in long, hypnotic and caressing tracking shots. Paying no heed to film genres, mixing time lines, indulging in fantasy, the director thwarts codes and shifts assignments. With unexpected lyricism, carried by discreet and melancholic musical surges, she endeavours to loosen and link up bodies and voices, to make what happened palpable. To give body to a haunted world and, as indicated by the constellation in the film's title, to shine a light on the voids and the missing, whose pale light illuminates the place.