Press Quotes
“For this writer, film of the festival was Laura Waddington’s CARGO, an atmospheric and melancholy personal journey by merchant ship and a perceptive analysis of the emotional cost of globalisation”
Gareth Evans, SIGHT AND SOUND, London
“CARGO is nothing less than dazzling. Visually, it’s superb (the dreamlike images, the work on time, the astonishing colours) but most of all, through her use of voice over, she lends these men an exemplary humanity and dignity.”
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Olivier Nicklaus, LES INROCKUPTIBLES, Paris
“A powerful adventure on the Mediterranean with undocumented sailors, by one of the most brilliant and courageous filmmakers of her generation, worthy heir to Henri Storck, Paul Strand, Marcel Hanoun.”
LA CINEMATHEQUE FRANCAISE, Paris
“The ARTE Prize for a European short film goes to Laura Waddington’s CARGO, a lyrical voyage on the Mediterranean depicted in a series of distended moments. Combining diaristic text with painterly visuals, the director recounts a dialogue between a mute woman and the forgotten men who work on a cargo ship. We are drawn into a nomadic journey at the frontier of European consciousness; a reflection on what it means to be a citizen without country, to drift without destination. In this way, Waddington opens up a broader reflection of the nature of human identity and human existence”
International Jury Statement ARTE PRIZE FOR BEST EUROPEAN SHORT FILM, OBERHAUSEN
“Lost in Space: Poetic and exquisitely beautiful, Laura Waddington’s dream video diary records the melancholy shadow life of a container ship in perpetual limbo”
THE NEW YORK VIDEO FESTIVAL, FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER
“In CARGO there is again a chosen limit: She boards in semi-secrecy a ship bound for the Middle East. From her cabin she records the journey trying to save a few traces, a few images of the ships loading and unloading, impressions that come to her and which she seizes almost blindly. What she records most of all is the difficulty of only being able to live the world by moving across it and withdrawing from its tumult.”
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Bouchra Khalili, THE 51st OBERHAUSEN SHORT FILM FESTIVAL CATALOGUE
“To once again quote Waddington: “What did the periphery tell us about our over lit centre and all of us who inhabit it?” It is the periphery that interests the director, the decentralized zone where, however, exchanges — often illegal — take place, the loading and unloading of cargo, conversations and thefts. In fact the footage contains scenes that would be otherwise unobserved, where characters oblivious to the camera’s gaze act in the shadows, suspended in the context of the port. The director herself, however, is obliged to occupy an extremely limited area, which allows little possibility of movement and thus a very restricted visual field; hidden behind the portholes of the cargo hold, she illegally captures the life of the port, risking discovery”
Cecilia Bima VISUAL GAPS: LOW DEFINITION FOR AN ETHICS OF BEARING WITNESS
“The reason we can appeal to the exemplary case of the shots of the Sonderkommando, to understand the signs generated by the railings or by the balustrades of CARGO, must be sought in the nature of the documentary and in its phenomenology. Laura Waddington, in her hidden posture, in her invisible but seeing existence, sets in motion a dynamic of gazes. This is why, in the observation of CARGO, one cannot avoid considering the signs of enunciation; in fact, they attest to a story that turns the documentary into the result of a processuality. In the attempt to avoid the exchange of glances of workers on the ship or those, on land, who work loading and unloading the cargo, Waddington chooses to distance herself and hide, she chooses a tricky viewpoint that produces out-of-focus and low-definition images. Her gaze onto the world rarely finds a reciprocity of gazes, and the person who is shot is not aware of the fact; it would seem to be about, at least apparently, a missed intersection of gazes, where artist’s eye is sheltered by a diaphragm that produces a safe distance. The gaze of the subjects, instead, would not be reciprocated, but rather would undergo only the pressure that the director exerts on them.”
Cecilia Bima VISUAL GAPS: LOW DEFINITION FOR AN ETHICS OF BEARING WITNESS
“On with CARGO to the enclosed spaces of journeys by ship in the company of some of the most wretched human beings on earth, seaman whose working=living conditions have considerably worsened in the last 20, 30 years. A tribe of the working class that in several ways has no fatherland. More often than not they’re prisoners of their vessels, its flag, as well as their own passports (if they have one): they can’t leave when the ship enters a harbour, more often than not they have to contain with looking at yet another country.”
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Olaf Möller , The 51st PESARO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL CATALOGUE, Italy
“For the stamina of personal vision which dares to find in the everyday glimpses of a rare and sublime passion, for understanding that these pictures have to be lived before they are produced, for its enclosed travelogue of barely met desires and palpable longings, for sharing its loneliness and the small hole we each peer through named the personality, which is also here the camera, the filmmaker herself no longer framing but framed, for opening into a world that was closing all around her the prize goes to CARGO by Laura Waddington”
International Jury Statement, FIRST PRIZE EX AEQUO, VIDEOEX 2002, Zurich
“As in previous productions, such as The Lost Days (1999), Waddington uses the travelogue as a pattern to tell a personal story and/or a social story. For most of the young men on board, the romance of the carefree life of the seaman has lost its shine along the way. Many have ended up in a hopeless situation: some have received no pay for months, some have not been ashore for years. The uncertainty, being totally at the mercy of the owners on shore, who are sometimes not in touch for weeks at a time, places them in a world that is very remote from ours”
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Christel Vesters, WWVF CATALOGUE, Amsterdam 2001
“Laura Waddington’s talent does not simply consist in observing reality. Whether she is scrutinizing the shadows or fixing her camera on the faces of men adrift (the sailors in CARGO seem to come straight out of a novel, a feeling heightened by the style of the voice-over) her video camera transports us into a dimension where time no longer has a hold. A sensuous experience during which we become sailors without a port or refugees in the night. Ghosts wandering over the surface of our earth… In her own fashion the director bears witness to the fate of those who have no voice. Her cinema is the reflection of a generous spirit”
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Pascal Mieszala, PLAN RAPPROCHÉ, France
“Undermining the assumed “authoritarian” nature of documentaries is Laura Waddington’s CARGO (2001). “It had been years since I had been able to watch like that – without the pretense of understanding,” admits the narrator, while Waddington’s observational camera stares out of a porthole. CARGO is an insightful contradiction of global transportation and restricted movement: traveling by cargo ship for the Middle East, neither Waddington nor the other workers are allowed to disembark at ports. In lieu of unlimited access, Waddington uses her constraints as an aesthetic device. Filtered through a necessary extreme zoom and rendered in slow motion, Cargo’s images are hazy and hypnotic: the ambiguities of truth and understanding become manifest in the blurred pixels of digital video. ”
Cullen Gallagher, THE L MAGAZINE, US
“While ports are often portrayed as the beginning or ending of stories, for these sailors, ports are their life, on hold, in transit and never getting anywhere… impressions of moments of despair, solitude, camaraderie, love and boredom, and you, as audience or “reader” are lulled into a similar state of drifting… Her sailors have a tenderness about them…- men standing on decks, sleeping in shelters, silently waiting.”
Koon Yee-wan, MUSE Issue 30, Hong Kong