Documentary Credit

In sweeping, enigmatic travelling shots Meyer and Schaerf traverse the paths of a Palestinian refugee camp. We see occasional children, encounters between people, but we mainly become aware of the scruffy buildings and a sad site with no sense of 'home', of a strong sense of homelessness, of a place of passage, but who knows where to? Refusing the conventional voice-over of documentary formats, the artists (who have created many other pieces and installations around ideas of place/locale and geography) offer the viewer a sparse and unconventional document of a location. They leave us to observe and assess these spaces of the 'other', to confront an environment without the comfort of an intermediary, be they Palestinian occupant or documentary commentator from outside.The title of the film refers to a banking term. Meyer and Schaerf: 'It starts out in a camp, the paradigm of our century characterised by extermination, expulsion, asylum seeking, and a migration organised by the state. (...) Documentary Credit not only documents in order to deduce the credit for its truth, but it is rather an essayists film that uses cutting and sound track in such a way that the material clarifies and contradicts itself, so that the shared risk of trust can take effect.'