Maalbeek
On March 22, 2016, a bomb exploded at Maalbeek metro station in Brussels. Sabine was there. She survived, but she remembers nothing. Her memory of the event is fractured, incomplete, contradictory. There is no stable testimony, no reliable image of what happened to her.
The film does not attempt to reconstruct the bombing. Instead, it represents the shape of an absence. Through point clouds, fragmented sound, and the slow erosion of recognizable forms, it makes the viewer experience what it feels like when the past refuses to cohere into a single narrative. Memory is not replayed. It is felt as a wound that keeps shifting.
Maalbeek is a film about the impossibility of accessing one's own experience. The impossibility becomes generative: it is because Sabine cannot remember that the film exists in this form. The apparatus was invented to be true to her condition.
Technical
- Format 4K, 16:9, color
- Duration 16 minutes
- Year 2020
Credits
- Director / Screenplay Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis
- Sound Alban Cayrol
- Editing Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis
- Producer Films Grand Huit (Lionel Massol)
- Distributor Agence du court metrage
"A mixture of testimonies and archive footage shapes this painful investigation, all the more poignant as it evokes an out-of-body experience, like those had at the gates of death. The screen often dissolves into a pointillist mist, but something essential persists: emotion."
— Leo Soesanto, Critics' Week at the Cannes Film Festival
"Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis continues his exploration of our contemporary relationship to images. [...] How do we make sense when memory fails us? How do we rebuild ourselves from an incomplete puzzle of our lives?"
— International Independent Film Festival of Bordeaux (FIFIB)
"Maalbeek demonstrates a perfect mastery of the audiovisual medium to convey a disturbed mental state. Through this short documentary, Chandoutis creates a space where images are no longer just a reflection of reality, but a manifestation of the effort of a broken memory trying to rebuild itself. The film plays with the codes of documentary filmmaking to question our relationship to images and technology in a world where everything seems archivable, except for personal trauma."
— Institut français
"This short film by Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis has the potential to unsettle, both by the subject it tackles and by its treatment. If like me, before the screening, the title didn't ring any bells, it's certain that you won't forget it anytime soon."
— SensCritique
"Maalbeek's unique approach, which refuses to explicitly depict the traumatic event, makes it a deeply human film, a sensitive exploration of the unspoken and missing images that haunt our collective memory."
— Unifrance
"Faire des films, c'est desamorcer la peur."
— Telerama