This film was made, shot and plays out in the first person. The film maker crawled into the head of a traumatised Afghanistan veteran and let this scared and depressed soldier make the film, as it were. This ‘I’, the soldier and hence also the film maker, films his surroundings with his mobile phone camera. His everyday surroundings in an everyday way. Like a diary. The diary of a soldier and yet also the diary of a film maker.
The protagonist, the film maker, usually stays indoors in his small flat in Amsterdam. Maybe he doesn’t dare go outside without helmet and rifle. Peering down, he films events in the street. Oversensitive to tension and violence, he records the quarrels of street-corner kids and the police violence that accompanies it. He records surroundings as they become harsher. Surroundings that visualise his inner fears. In this way, the film gives shape to a fear that is actually unmentionable.
There is hardly any dialogue. It is the atmospheric and occasionally miraculous images that do the work; the subjective viewpoint of someone traumatised. His fear portrayed.
The phone shots have a deliberately low resolution. It gives them a pictorial and abstract quality. An experimental approach that may only be comparable with the honourable experimental tradition of filming with 8mm. The grain from the past has become the pixel of today. (GjZ)