Palms
( Ladoni )

Artur Aristakisian
1994 - 138 min - 35 mm - Noir & Blanc - Russie

An immersion into the world of beggars, the excluded and the marginalised. Men, women and children with distorted bodies walk the streets in search of a little sustenance. They are captured and followed in the streets of Chisinau, Moldavia by Aristakisian who films them frontally, walking ahead of them or catching up to them as if driven by an impulse, the necessity to deliver, in a letter addressing a son yet unborn, a mystical and visionary chant, calling on the listener to oppose the “system” and to join the resisting “body” of the poor.
"Chisinau, Moldavia. Dropouts, handicapped persons, members of the urban underclass are the heroes of this fresco in black and white. The film leaves them mute; it is their bodies and their gestures that speak for them. As well as the voice of the filmmaker who accompanies them, soothers them and consoles them from a distance. But this distance is not that of observation; it is rather the loving gap of a hallucinatory gaze, backed up by a commentary in form of a letter addressed his son to be born, in order to better sing their misery as the place of their saintliness. Artur Aristakisian, man of few films, all formats included, offers here a visionary cinema." (Jean-Pierre Rehm)