This brief experimental documentary about migration to Europe comes from the Italian artists Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo and is a collage of unused footage from video pieces they have made together over the past 15 years. It’s a film with interesting things to say about the fortressing of Europe during that time, but I confess to finding it hard going and slightly frustrating. By the end I wondered if it might not have worked better as a gallery installation alongside the duo’s earlier works.
It opens in 2006, at night on Lampedusa, the tiny Sicilian island where thousands fleeing war and poverty in Africa and the Middle East arrive on dinghies and small boats every year. We’re in a car parked on a busy dock and a man, heard not seen, hums a song, trying to remember words in Arabic. This is Abdelhamid, who is Tunisian and employed as a seasonal worker at a hotel on the island. He’s also an interpreter for the film-makers.
In the present day we hear director Iorio reminding Abdelhamid of some of the experiences they shared: visiting an archaeological museum to see ancient mosaics, interviewing a researcher. But it’s not always easy to follow her voiceover.
Chronicles of That Time is a film of fragments. Like a mosaic, scenes are tiles from which a portrait gradually emerges. We hear snippets of an interview with two Tunisian men in their 20s who talk about living and working undocumented in Europe before being deported. There are musical interludes and Iorio laments increasingly inhumane government policies against refugees.
It’s daring and original not to make this film in the hand-wringing style of conventional documentaries about the so-called refugee crisis. But I did find myself feeling a little adrift, wanting to know more about the reality of the lives of people it features.
This brief experimental documentary about migration to Europe comes from the Italian artists Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo and is a collage of unused footage from video pieces they have made together over the past 15 years. It’s a film with interesting things to say about the fortressing of Europe during that time, but I confess to finding it hard going and slightly frustrating. By the end I wondered if it might not have worked better as a gallery installation alongside the duo’s earlier works.
It opens in 2006, at night on Lampedusa, the tiny Sicilian island where thousands fleeing war and poverty in Africa and the Middle East arrive on dinghies and small boats every year. We’re in a car parked on a busy dock and a man, heard not seen, hums a song, trying to remember words in Arabic. This is Abdelhamid, who is Tunisian and employed as a seasonal worker at a hotel on the island. He’s also an interpreter for the film-makers.
In the present day we hear director Iorio reminding Abdelhamid of some of the experiences they shared: visiting an archaeological museum to see ancient mosaics, interviewing a researcher. But it’s not always easy to follow her voiceover.
Chronicles of That Time is a film of fragments. Like a mosaic, scenes are tiles from which a portrait gradually emerges. We hear snippets of an interview with two Tunisian men in their 20s who talk about living and working undocumented in Europe before being deported. There are musical interludes and Iorio laments increasingly inhumane government policies against refugees.
It’s daring and original not to make this film in the hand-wringing style of conventional documentaries about the so-called refugee crisis. But I did find myself feeling a little adrift, wanting to know more about the reality of the lives of people it features.