Tin City

In a remote forest in northwest Germany, an urban combat facility called “Tin City” is used to train British soldiers before deployment in Northern Ireland. A bar, a bank, a shop – each location reveals another iteration of the same macabre set-up.

We gradually discover Tin City in the fragments of images unearthed from a German news report. The town is not marked on any map, yet it is not invisible. Quite the contrary, it is the most readable of all towns: saturated by the most predictable, stereotyped representations, it brims with recognisable signs. A strange, macabre town, built deep in a forest in western Germany. Its inhabitants? Plastic mannequins there to simulate the everyday life of Belfast residents. A voice-over explains to us: Tin City is not fictional place, but a British training camp designed to prepare soldiers for the war in Northern Ireland. Akin to a film set, a place with no real history, but where history is written ahead of time. War becomes a game, as if the illusion of a territory were enough. But Tin City does not boil down to an artefact from the past. We learn that it is still operational, that it has absorbed other stories, other conflicts and continues to be used by NATO forces. 

Little by little, the film shifts away from the archive to build the missing images, now outside the town. In these images, new mannequins appear: children. Yet no child has ever lived in Tin City. Their factitious presence confesses: the military training stages the silence and denial at the very core of its learning apparatus. The voice-over, again from the archives, asks its question about these new faces: “When will this conflict end?” It immediately brings Gaza to mind along with its thousands of children killed in a place where war is not a game, rather a veritable massacre. Another colonised land that has lost the legitimacy to defend itself due to a silencing built on lies. And, as always, far from anyone’s gaze. 

Clémence Arrivé Guezengar