QUAND JE SERAI DICTATEUR

What does making someone else’s autobiography imply? How do you tell the most intimate of stories – the narrator’s friendship with Georges, his madness, his disappearance – with 8-mm and Super-8 footage filmed by complete strangers? Generous and mischievous, the answer is immediately given by the film’s title, combining a noun that, in our world, is associated with the past and the collective (“dictator”), and a first-person future tense. We find ourselves in a universe where skilful editing explodes reality into a plurality of possible universes. Contrary to many dubious fact-obsessed films that abound in the hazy documentary sphere, Yaël André distils the home movie to extract its fictional momentum. Here, the most ordinary details bear the imprint of a diffuse strangeness; and a newborn’s smile, which we swear we have seen a thousand times, moves us anew, a cliché suddenly stripped bare. History plays a secondary role in this journey through the past seventy years, but thanks to the underlying associations between the sequences and the voice-over, the friend’s grief can collide with the last fires of Belgian colonisation. But make no mistake: even though the film’s form becomes more playful and its tone more cheerful, the question of psychological life or death intensifies and boils down to one core challenge – accepting that one has no life except one’s own. (Charlotte Garson)