Sans soleil

An unknown woman reads and comments on letters she receives from a friend, a freelance cameraman. He travels around the world and is especially interested in the two most “extreme poles of survival”, Japan and Africa, the latter represented here by Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands. The cameraman wonders what the point is of describing the world like this when he is always its instrument, and what part memory, which he helps to create, plays?

One of his Japanese comrades has an obsession in the form of an electron. He answers the question in his own way by distorting memory by means of a synthesizer. A filmmaker takes up the idea and makes a film out of it, but instead of showing people and their relationships, he chooses to present the story as a musical composition with recurring themes, mirrored counterpoints and fugues: the letters, the woman’s comments, images which have been collected, the recorded images and a few borrowed ones.