THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
Elsewhere, everywhere, Shahin nowhere. Here is a film made without filming or actor, whose hero, Shahin Parsa, a young Iranian migrant, remains off-screen during the entire time of this poetic and sensory performance, directed by Isabelle Ingold and Vivianne Perelmuter. From Shahin, we will only hear the voice, mingled with that of a narrator, the whole making up the fragmented account of his journey from the town of Fooladshahr, where he lived with his family, to a mining town in the north of France. England, where he ended up failing, like so many other migrants.
As for the image, it is the treasure of this dazzling feature film, the strong idea that transports us for an hour into a half-real, half-fantasized other world. The film was made from surveillance camera footage available on the Internet. From this digital control material, the directors made graphic tables. They spent time viewing, doing “scouting” in the no man’s land of highways, peri-urban areas, late-night fast food restaurants, deserts as in a painting by Edward Hopper.
They decided to draw from this flow as we would select rushes, choosing the color (an acid yellow, an icy blue) or preferring the dark, pixelated grain of black and white, giving us some news in the form of ‘a charcoal abstraction. Produced before the health crisis, this work from Godard, haunted by drawing, photography and painting, ends up arriving in theaters, like a pebble on the beach. The film opens with four sumptuous minutes of a sparkling sea in the charcoal gray of a rocky coast, and here we are nowhere other than the cinema.
Sound and visual creation
The sensitive universe ofElsewhere, everywhere also echoes the loneliness of Shahin, a real “camera eye” who observes the world in front of his computer screen, cloistered in his apartment, which he shares with two Sudanese and two Kurds. Isabelle Ingold and Vivianne Perelmuter met him in Greece, in 2016. He was 20 years old and thought his life was going to be “Finally start”. A year later, Shahin disillusioned, the Ferris wheel stopped turning: “I’m 21, I’m old. I got old fast. “
Refusing to chronicle this unfortunately too well known “meantime”, of journeys often told in tragedies, the filmmakers invent a story with several voices, to be listened to and watched as a sound and visual creation. Shahin’s soft voice echoes in English, rephrasing the question-and-answer questions of the interrogation he faced to gain refugee status – where is he from, what is his level of education, how far from Tehran is the town of Fooladshahr, etc. ? -, one of the objectives of the interview aimed at verifying the veracity of the routes. “They want the truth, but if you tell the truth, it backfires. (…) Lying all the time, that’s hell ”, explains the young man in voiceover. Shahin doesn’t tell his relatives everything either. A dialogue with holes is woven with his mother, in Farsi, born of their telephone conversations.
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