Ici-bas

During a demonstration, an elderly woman heckles the authorities. She speaks out against the “usurpers” who have evicted her from her house and forced her into the street. In the ministry office, a secretary compulsively pulls her rings on and off, varnishes her nails, before returning to her keyboard. The two women are faceless… just a spewing mouth for one and fingers for the other… A woman is raising her children alone in a slum next to a building site. Only the two children are filmed, always together, always squabbling. The world filmed by Ici bas is incomplete, fragmentary, with half of itself missing and thus chaotic. This chaos has a name, a centre: Erevan, the capital of Armenia. A date: today, twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet empire. A cause: democracy. Yet with its values misinterpreted-when liberty rhymes with excessive individualism and the wealth of the few feeds on the growing poverty of the majority. (Yann Lardeau)