THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
Denis Gheerbrant, documentary filmmaker born in 1948, has long questioned the world of the excluded, all alone, camera on his shoulder, with a concern “of equality » with his interlocutors – Identity issue (1986), Life is huge and full of dangers (1994), The Republic Marseilles (2009), Mallé in his exile (2019), etc But it was in tandem with Lina Tsrimova, a young Russian documentary filmmaker from the North Caucasus, that he co-directed The hill, a stunning essay shot in a giant landfill on the outskirts of Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, a Central Asian country from the former Soviet Union. At the end of the end of mass overconsumption, here is the waste. Plastic bottles, glasses… Men and women are toiling to sort them, armed with their big bags.
The site of the dump appears as a smoking monster, overflown by birds, which one wonders how they still manage to breathe. It could be hell, or the start of a play by Samuel Beckett, Oh good days, with his character half-buried on a mound. In The hill, precisely, a couple of Gypsies, Alexander and Alyosha, took root on the mountain of waste. It is here that they live, installed under a parasol which protects them a little from the wind and the sun. They do sorting, and drink too. You can’t live here without vodka, says Alexandre, who started drinking to avoid fights when he was young and fiery: “One liter and you’re stiff. » Later, he will deliver heavier memories.
At night, the sorters’ headlamps swept the glow of lit fires, here and there, to destroy the residues. It took time for the duo of filmmakers to gain acceptance on the site. We thus discover Tajikhan, colorful scarf and wide visor: this lady, born in 1959 in Kyrgyzstan, worked in the kolkhozes before failing here. Democracy came, there was no more work, she said. She has to feed her three remaining children – five others are dead. Emotion washed over him. Gheerbrant and Tsrimova focus on life stories, reducing the film to its proper length (1:17), as if out of modesty.
“Trained like a dog”
Alexandre weighs his words, and his truth is all the more difficult to hear. At the age of 16, he enlisted in the army, serving for six years his “homeland”. Then she abandoned him, without benefits or anything. The traumas of the former sniper, who shot at everything that moves, remain engraved. The worst, he says, was during the conflict in Chechnya (1994-1996), when Moscow sent its troops to Grozny to restore its power over the breakaway republic. The horrors that Alexander committed will forever prevent him from reintegrating into society. “I was trained like a dog to go into battle (…). We are told “go ahead”, and we go. »
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