Nuit remue
Bijan Anquetil
2012 - 45 min - HD - Noir & Blanc - France

"On the screen, black melts into the obscurity of night, where voices rise up – the voices of young Afghan migrants somewhere on the edge of a Paris, more guessed at than real. Bijan Anquetil plunges us into their nocturnal world, into their night, which is very much a youthful one, full of vitality, lived in and active. For this night, far from being sleepy, is stirring things up, as the title borrrowed from Henri Michaux suggests, and will not let itself be tamed.
A night that we are led to understand is also poetic and metaphorical. A night of the unclassified, of those who are invisible as far as the administration is concerned, but a rich night, lively, full of laughter, fears and desires. Anquetil gives them back their visibility, ripping them out of the world of ghosts. There is no pathos here, no horrific narrative, but the recording – no less important – of their crucial economy of survival, their obstinate determination to ‘make it’ or, quite simply, to arrive at the end of such a long journey. A night lit up by images from elsewhere, from before. Anquetil’s night shots provide an appropriate background for fragile, rudimentary images, for memories, testimony of events captured randomly during the journey with their own phones. A night shot through with rays of light, as a face looms up or a chalk map drawn on the ground. But is that not part of the promise, literally speaking, of cinema, to emerge from the depths of night through its furtive incandescence. A promise modestly balanced here by the simple hope of another day dawning." (Nicolas Féodoroff, FID 2012)