Middle of the Moment

Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel spent more than two years on the road with the acrobats of the French Cirque O, with Tuareg nomads in the mountains of the Southern Sahara and with the American poet, clown and philosopher Robert Lax. From the enormous amount of audio and visual material then recorded on their travels, they have compiled what they call ‘a film poem’. ‘Our journeys were not only an attempt to understand the traditional and new forms of nomadic life. They also form a quest for the poetic language of film, with all its ways of improvising: a process of invention, a quest for a way of life in which discoveries are still possible, life as reaching for new horizons. That is what film should also be. We have called it Middle of the Moment, maybe because that is what we find attractive about our travelling lifestyle: a sensitivity for the essence of every moment, being somewhere else in the blink of an eye, between arrival and departure, always moving towards openness. (…) We found a nameless grave on the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, with an inscription that could serve as leitmotif for this film: “They were amazed about the beauty of the journey that took them to the end of their lives”.’ (Nicolas Humbert, Werner Penzel)