LA CHASSE AU SNARK

“A human being who doesn’t one day blow a fuse is mad”. These are the words of Sullivan Damien David, whose triple forename bears the mark of a painful family past. Le Snark, a self-managed Belgian educational institute for children with behavioural disorders, is thus filled with human beings who are not mad. Steering clear of caricature, The Hunting of the Snark films the challenge of containing the boarders’ violence with a non-repressive approach (“Here, if there are no insults, as young Angèle points out, there’s no dialogue”). With a rare fluidity, the film combines an overall chronicle of the school year – the building, an educators’ meeting, the emptiness of the long weekends for the few children not going home – and rapid but probing incursions into the private worlds of some students whose albeit sketchy profile is not quickly forgotten, especially as it awakens memories of 400 Coups or the Dardennes’ films. If F.-X. Drouet seems to have no trouble in finding the famous “right distance” for his documentary, it may be because Le Snark’s teachers are marking it out for themselves day after day. (Charlotte Garson)