L’ Empreinte

Of Herat, “the Pearl of Khorassan”, one of the Silk Road’s chief cities and much coveted today as in the past, L’Empreinte chooses to show us the city’s less exotic, but also livelier side: the pressure of work on men in a bakery. Outside the bakery’s closed interior, not a single image, only sounds… the roar of motorbikes, the purring of cars, the inevitable hooting of horns, children’s laughter… Nothing from outside perturbs the frantic rhythm of work, not even the customers’ comings and goings. Here, the bakery is not a shop but a dilapidated production centre with green, pink and blue walls, a small factory absorbed by its own activity, imposing its rhythm, its respiration and its pace on the men who live there, as well as on the camera. Although production is chained, from the kneading to the shaping and then the baking, although gestures follow on from one work station to another, still, each is turned in on himself, a prisoner of his own repeated gesture, so much so that the bakery’s self confinement is echoed in the bakers’ own. Even their breaks fail to bring them together: each seems lost in his own thoughts, one chews naswar, which procures inebriation and pleasure, another savours his tea. The few words they exchange are mainly about the filmmaker and his home country, so far away, so different. For them, what is “off screen” is not Herat and beyond, Afghanistan, but France and us, the viewers. (Yann Lardeau)