Border: Press Quotes
“But the shock of the [Locarno film] festival is the cinema of Laura Waddington. Thirty-four years old, English, she lived illegally in New York, then spent a few years travelling with the world’s exiles in the most dangerous places. Due to a plane phobia, she made these journeys on buses, cargo ships, hitchhiking. But aside from planes, Laura Waddington is afraid of nothing and her video camera carries all her courage and her conscience, slung across her shoulder. Border is the trace of the months that she spent in Sangatte, hidden in the fields, each night, with Afghan and Iraqi refugees. Shot secretly, the shutter wide open, almost in slow motion, the images create an aesthetic experience of fear and of pursuit, as if emerging from a nightmare peopled with blurred figures. Border links the fields of Sangatte to that terrified part of our imagination, that lurks deep within within each one of us.”
Philippe Azoury, Libération, Paris
Read article: Caméras libres (English translation)
Read article: Caméras libres (French original)
“A thousand miles away from the television reports that vainly try to give a hypothetical identity to these displaced bodies, Laura Waddington’s desperate camera scrupulously avoids the refugees’ faces to convey an animal condition, a status of hunted beasts. Nothing predatory, no social dogma, just real empathy in this worried and audacious filming. And if the image is superb, at times pushing Border towards the boundaries of video dance and thus annoying certain guards of the temple of ethics, this is primarily due to a technical necessity, the DV camera’s shutter wide open to compensate for the lack of light, resulting in a large trembling grain, an impression of slow motion, movements like so many imprints.”
Bertrand Loutte, Les Inrockuptibles, Paris
“Subtle and powerful, the work of this English filmmaker, nomadic observer of the world and devoted translator of fear and hope, as in the film Border (International Competition/ Special Mention) a tragic document about the powerless attempts of Afghan and Iraqi refugees to escape from France to England and the violent police repression that followed the closure of the camp of Sangatte.”
Elena Marcheschi, Il Manifesto, Rome
“Juxtaposed with eloquent images that suggest way more than what they actually show. The result is simply astonishing: an expressionist piece with a visual and sound design that wondrously exposes, in a reflexive manner, the pain and suffering of others as though it were your own”
Pablo Suárez, Buenos Aires Herald, Argentina
“Set only in the wide open, with refugees, silhouettes in the sheltering darkness, moving in the wind and the rain, crossing landscapes, anonymous to the eye yet known by name to the narrator, Laura Waddington … There’s a heroic compassion of quasi-Kurosawa’ian dimensions to each image, a justness to each movement that in its humbleness speaks gloriously of all the growth and learning done in all those years on the road.”
Olaf Möller, 41a Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema Pesaro Catalogue, Italy
Read catalogue essay: The Days and Years of My Travels (English original)
Read catalogue essay: The Days and Years of My Travels (Italian translation)
“Border bears witness to the harsh reality of shadows, to a group of invisible people at the side of the road and is the most eloquent political and artistic metaphor ever expressed”
Mar del Plata International Film Festival Catalogue, Argentina
“Have the fireflies disappeared? Of course not. Some of them are very near to us — they brush against us in the night; others have gone elsewhere, beyond the horizon, trying to reform their community, their minority, their shared desire. Even here, Waddington’s images remain, as well as the names—in the closing credits—of all those people she met. We can watch the film again, we can show it, and circulate glimpses, which will spark others: firefly-images.”
Georges Didi-Huberman, Survivance des lucioles, Éditions de Minuit, Paris
Read book excerpt: Survivance des lucioles (English translation)
Read book excerpt: Survivance des lucioles (French original)
“A radical call for heterogeneity, diversity, the image saturated to the limits of the visible, producing the disconcerting revelation: there is nothing left to see, only pieces to gather. It is, without doubt, what we call a vision of the world, the least obvious but the most painfully contemporary”
Bouchra Khalili, The 51st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen Catalogue, Germany
Read catalogue essay: The Pain of Seeing
“It is at this precise point that the work of Laura Waddington situates itself, in the region of absence and loss. Her territory begins at the edges of the visible, where absence persists in maintaining itself for a moment longer. It is the darkness which allows the palpitation of the visible, the recording of a luminous imprint signaling a presence which does not stop disappearing. And a quality of image grain, which marks itself out as a difficult and necessary vision.”
Bouchra Khalili, The 51st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen Catalogue, Germany
Read catalogue essay: The Pain of Seeing
“There are few things as important in cinema today as the efforts of brave filmmakers like Laura Waddington. In the spirit of Hanoun, Ivens, Adachi and others, Waddington loaned her physical presence to the cause, spending months at the Sangatte Red Cross Camp, …The rarefied ambiance of Waddington’s images is difficult to forget.”
José Sarmiento Hinojosa, Crucial 21st Century Cinema, #DirectedbyWomen
Read article: #Crucial21DbW: Border
“The images in Border … search for a new formula of community based around sharing a common space and a gaze that would take the gaze of the other into account. These, as Sergei Eisenstein would say, “inspired images of audiovisual exaltation” emerge … from a place where politics is born, even though it is not called politics and has no representatives.”
Paweł Mościcki, Widok: Teorie i Praktyki Kultury Wizualnej no. 14, Warsaw
Read article: The Image as Common Good: on Laura Waddington’s Border (English translation)
Read article: The Image as Common Good: on Laura Waddington’s Border (Polish original)
“In these prolonged shots there is the courageous will of Waddington to explore the shadowy zones of the contemporary, the territories occupied by the invisible peoples, dragging themselves into the bubble of globalization.”
Stefania Rimini, Immaginazioni: Riscritture e ibridazioni fra teatro e cinema, Bonanno Editore, Italy
Read book chapter: Frammenti di cinema resistente (Italian original)
“Border is in fact a rare example of harmonious alignment between ethical and aesthetic planes; the touching quality of the images (grainy, unstable, at times actually slowed down) is always at the service of emotion, and thus it happens that the fragile beauty of silhouettes pressed against the horizon can become a cry, a flash, a firefly.”
Stefania Rimini, Immaginazioni: Riscritture e ibridazioni fra teatro e cinema, Bonanno Editore, Italy
Read book chapter: Frammenti di cinema resistente (Italian original)
“The immediacy of the struggle: René Vautier named this cinema of performative immediacy a cinema of social intervention, which has as its aim the success of a struggle and the concrete transformation of a situation of conflict or injustice. This in situ cinema, nowadays accomplished… by Laura Waddington when she follows the struggle of immigrants in Border or by Godard when he made Prière pour refusniks”
Nicole Brenez, Political Cinema Today – The New Exigencies: For a Republic of Images, Screening the Past
“In this case, the nocturnal darkness is simultaneously a literal darkness (one never lit by natural light, but only by the lights of the institutions charged with keeping the refugees under control) and an ethical one: these refugees are the casualties of political decisions of Western nations that were now refusing to accept the responsibility for the damage their decisions had caused.”
Scott M. MacDonald, Comprehending Cinema, Oxford University Press
“There is something tragically beautiful in the images of Waddington, which call to mind the phrase that Grandieux and Brenez used for their series on filmmakers, committed to political resistance: “It may be that beauty has strengthened our resolve.”
José Sarmiento Hinojosa, Desistfilm, Lima
Read article: Panorama: Tres cortometrajes de Laura Waddington (Spanish original)
“It was in 2002: the illegality of the situation, the police lying in wait, the race through the fields, the omnipresence of the night lit only by the danger of helicopter searchlights, all that gives her film’s images their condition of invisibility, but also, more powerfully a proximity to these men, these women and these children whose features we hardly see – whose desperate clamours we hear at a moment when faced with the police– but of who the film manages to construct, admirably, like a poem, their dignity.”
Georges Didi-Huberman, Dictionnaire mondial des images, Nouveau Monde Éditions, Paris
Read book excerpt: Figurants (French original)
“This threatening darkness permeates every image in Border, and we might go so far as to say that Laura Waddington … closely follows Theodor Adorno’s 1945 theories on the darkness of art, more specifically what the German philosopher referred to as the ‘ideal of blackness’ (Ideal der Schwärze), which would become a favored attribute of openly ‘radical’ art (radikale Kunst), from Malévich’s suprematist paintings to Ad Reinhardt’s black monochromes.”
Ricardo Lessa Filho and Frederico Vieira, Logos 52, vol. 27, no. 1, Rio de Janeiro
“Remarkable also are the filmmakers today who accompany the oppressed without any political organisation to support them, in the manner of Laura Waddington or Jean-Gabriel Leynaud or Jérôme Schlomoff and François Bon, alongside the homeless.”
Nicole Brenez, Cinémas d’avant-garde, Cahiers du Cinéma/Les Petits Cahiers, Paris
Read excerpt: Anticiper ou accompagner les luttes politiques (English translation)
Read excerpt: Anticiper ou accompagner les luttes politique (French original)
“This is why Laura Waddington decides to recapture attempts at flight specifically outside the circumscribed zone of the camp, flooded by the blinding and overseeing lights of the State. It is instead the blank spots, the area just outside, that attracts her attention: the darkness, tall grass and bushes are the occasion for those fleeing to free themselves from the headlights of the Kingdom and to emerge, in Pasolini’s words, as fireflies: “It would be criminal and stupid to place fireflies beneath a projector believing to observe them better.”
Cecilia Bima, Lacune visive: Bassa definizione per un’etica della testimonianza
Read chapter: Border: luce, bagliori e soggetti politici (English translation)
“Border appears visually grainy and ambiguous, unfolding at a hauntingly decelerated and piecemeal pace as its images leave a kind of retinal residue even as they dissolve into new scenarios. This stuttering, hazy effect prevents a kind of cognitive distancing … the camera’s limits in low-light conditions expose the ethical shortcomings of normative vision”
Iggy Cortez in Night Fever: Film and Photography after Dark, Walther König, Cologne
“This approach testifies to a media-ethical stance: Laura Waddington’s protagonists hide in the noise of the image. She protects them from being discovered … This runs entirely contrary to conventional TV journalism, or even to critically intended documentary films, in which faces often serve as the most important carriers of identification.”
Eva Kuhn, Images of Illegalized Immigration: Towards a Critical Iconology of Politics, Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld
Read book excerpt: Border: The Videographic Traces by Laura Waddington as a Cinematographic Memorial
“Waddington’s meeting with the migrants of the Sangatte camp and her denunciation of the inhumane situation turns into an alter-narrative that captures the dignity of men. The video’s spoken narrative carries its images, supplementing what the camera cannot or does not want to record. The complex interaction among images—at times frozen, sometimes blurred—pushes the perception of the visible towards abstraction, while the voice takes over, supplying the details.”
Marion Hohlfeldt, Interventions vol. 2, no. 1 , New York
Read essay: Betwixt and Between: Displacement and Liminality in Laura Waddington’s Border
“The image not only captures a reality, but also produces one. The work of art is not simply shown or said, but is a complex montage situated between ‘showing’ and ‘telling.’ Border shows the in-between as the human condition in an inhumane environment.”
Marion Hohlfeldt, Interventions, vol. 2, no. 1 , New York
Read essay: Betwixt and Between: Displacement and Liminality in Laura Waddington’s Border
“Light years away from conventional cinema, far beyond the formalism of experimental cinema, radically opposed to the language of television and refusing the informative stance of documentary, the author shares in Border her experience of video-activism, working on the frontier of images … anchor[ing] inside her memory and that of the spectators, the undefined presence of those who, without a face, without documents and in search of a future, are reclaiming their right to exist, to be recognised, and to live.”
Elena Marcheschi, Videoestetiche dell’emergenza: L’immagine della crisi nella sperimentazione audiovisiva, Edizioni Kaplan, Turin
Read book excerpt: Oltre la rappresentazione, dentro la vita in Border di Laura Waddington (English translation)
“Causing a shockwave within the audience at the time … Border revealed the pitiful truth about the police violence ensuing from the closure of the refugee camp on December 14, 2002. Georges Didi-Huberman named Waddington’s often blurred, abstracted images made with a small video camera firefly images, confronting us with the furtive appearance and disappearance of firefly peoples. Powerfully, Didi-Huberman refused to speak of refugees, and instead proposed the term “fugitives.” In an interview with Filippo Del Lucchese, Waddington confirmed that she had always felt safe being out during the night, and that the only time she had been threatened was when French soldiers with machine guns urged her to not carry on with her undertaking.”
Hilde Van Gelder, Ground Sea: Photography and the Right to Be Reborn, Vol. I, Leuven University Press
“It feels increasingly important as Border’s creation retreats into the past, even as refugees continue to arrive at Europe’s borders, to consider the possibility that although the individuals it records are no longer in this place – and we have no access to what has become of them – their images retain, or regain, their resilient power and present relevance at each new viewing.”
Alison Smith, Georges Didi-Huberman and Film: The Politics of the Image, Bloomsbury Publishing, London
Read book excerpt: Anachronism, Survival and Filmic Fireflies
“Just as the Sonderkommando photographs were taken clandestinely from beneath the gaze of the SS, Waddington evaded the surveillance of the French police and helicopter patrols as she bore witness to the plight of asylum seekers trying to reach England. Border presents her stolen testimony, operating outside the familiar iconography of mainstream media’s representation of asylum seekers.”
Chari Larsson, M/C Journal, vol. 15, no. 1, Australia
Read article: Suspicious Images: Iconophobia and the Ethical Gaze
“How can we avoid the blindness that comes from both darkness and light? … one way to achieve this is to pay attention to the untapped potential of images, which can reveal the singular in unknown, surprising forms. An example is Laura Waddington’s film Border, about Afghan and Iraqi refugees trying to reach England via the English Channel … The same medium that kills the experience can resurrect it, by giving us back a sense of empathy, of communion.”
Michel Laub, Como definir uma existência naqual a luz só aparece quando se está de olhos fechados?, Valor Econônomico, São Paulo
“Sangatte, frontier of the world. And metaphor with which to speak of all the frontiers of the world, and of Europe at a time when refugees are refused and, at best, inhabitants of a camp. A red sky and black earth, sometimes a black sky and red earth. Images that tell of unreality, as in a dream, a nightmare, something that you carry inside you, an intimate space, that those around you do not suspect.”
Federica Sossi, Jura Gentium Cinema, Italy
Read article: Sangatte: Frontiera del mondo (English translation)
Read article: Sangatte: Frontiera del mondo (Italian original)
Read article: Sangatte: Frontiera del mondo (German translation)
“Brutal contrast between the speeds of displacement—migration and travel—and brutal contrast between the places—clandestine and domestic—spaces that hardly ever meet and do not form ‘contact zones’ but rather ‘Europe’s backdoor’ to use the artist’s words ‘like a mirror held up to the world, that we have chosen to turn our backs to.”
Marion Hohlfeldt, Journal d’Exposition: Galerie Art & Essai, no. 10, Rennes
Read exhibition essay: Demain vous n’y penserez plus (French original)
“Border, on the other hand, represents the more socially engaged pole of this type of cinematic gleaning: the film is exactly like Laura herself, which in this case is a compliment. It is a curious, sincerely affected and semi-clandestinely filmed series of escape attempts by Afghan refugees from a rural camp in the north of France in the autumn of 2002. Since the film was shot entirely at night, Laura had to shoot with the minimum number of frames per second to capture even a hint of light, rendering all the figures mere blurred silhouettes. Faceless, nameless, without histories—in short, exactly as they appear in the average consciousness of the distant tragedy in the Middle East and the human waves that crash upon the West as a result. The faces, names and stories are given to them in a voice-over commentary which underpins the images, spoken by Laura, who has clearly done an excellent job of familiarising herself with the heart of the film’s subject, “I lost Abdullah and Mohammed. I never find them again,” she whispers as two shadows disappear into a field and rush after the train that is entering the Channel Tunnel that connects France and England. The abstract images shake and mesmerise, the voice sobers and compels reflection.”
Jurij Meden, Kinoplus, Ljubljana
Read article: Pesaro 2005 – skakanje na glavo (Slovenian original)
“In the dark of the night, the landscape becomes an ally of the refugees, concealing them from the police patrols. The ghostly, trespassing presence of the “imprisoned” figures, the spontaneity with which they move across the landscape, temporarily suspends the customary regime. This landscape provides a new way of seeing, a different perspective and fresh opportunity to relate to the question of migration – a chance to perceive the position of refugees within the space of Sangatte in a metaphorical sense.”
Mari Laanemets, Crime and Punishment Exhibition Catalogue, Kunsthalle Tallinn
Read article: Maantee, teeperv, buss: Laura Waddington filmist Piir (English translation)
“What Waddington was witness to, and what she tries to communicate, is the beauty and strength of a group of people motivated by hope to attempt what seems impossible. What she saw in the darkness around Sangatte was always moving and sometimes tragic, but it was also a form of spiritual light in the darkness”
Scott M. MacDonald in Technology and the Garden, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington
Read book excerpt: Gardens of the Moon; The Modern Cine Nocturne
“Border approaches with patience and caring the reality of the refugees trying to cross the channel tunnel, revealing a permanent sense of beauty and freedom in the hard struggle they are faced with. Each shot in Border creates a counterpoint regarding the established visual language created and dominated by culture, which is—in very simple and direct terms—the mask which hides the true face of the oppressor.”
Pedro Tavares, Politics & Poetry, European Foundation Joris Ivens website
Read interview: Sep 2016: Border (Laura Waddington) Curator: Pedro Tavares
“Intent on transgressing the modes of cinéma-verité, she does not observe the refugees from the outside: she moves with them, in the cold of the night; aligning herself with their anguish and their fears, undertaking an insecure negotiation with reality. She performs a total adhesion: seeking a visual cancellation of her own gaze, in order to become part of the fields, of the laboured breaths, of those attempts to run towards a more serene destination.”
Vincenzo Trione, Artivismo: Arte, politica, impegno, Guilio Einaudi Editore, Turin
Read book excerpt: Immaginari migranti (English translation)
Read book excerpt: Immaginari migranti (Italian original)
“Waddington’s camera brings us troubling messages from the night; the industrial haze bruising the sky, lights on the horizon where people sit at home watching television, a world away from the men and children moving through the grass like ghosts.”
Fiona Trigg, Turbulence: The 3rd Auckland Triennial Exhibition Catalogue, New Zealand
Read article: Laura Waddington: Border
“Placing the moral and ethical responsibility to look, fairly on the shoulders of the spectator: it is spectatorship outside of the politicised hierarchies of the media. Border is a potent reminder of what lies beyond the boundaries of the mainstream news press, a highly efficient mechanism for showing us either nothing, or showing us only clichés.”
Chari Larsson, Reading the Suspect: Interpretations and Aesthetics Conference, University of Queensland
Read conference paper: Suspicious Images: Iconoclasm and the Prohibition of Representation
“These works elaborate calls. They address viewers who more likely belong to the richest economies in the world, inviting them to engage perceptually, sensorially, sensibly, cognitively, corporeally with the distressful conditions of migration that they are suggested to be a part of. They are a call for historicization: they situate the forced displacements as a prolongation of colonialism. …They are a call for empathy: the artists are voicing or depicting their own empathy (Waddington, Lapointe, Ai, and Iñárritu in particular)”
Christine Ross, Art for Coexistence: Unlearning the Way We See Migration, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Christine Ross, Art for Coexistence: Unlearning the Way We See Migration
“Worlds apart from the documentaries that television news has accustomed us to, Border sets out on in search of the refugees of Sangatte, blending formal sophistication with raw information … From this risk-filled shoot, with its extreme technical constraints, she brought back images captured on the run—fragile, distorted, grainy.”
Mathilde Blottière and Laurent Rigoulet, Télérama, Paris
Read article: Laura Waddington: La caméra clandestine (English translation)
Read article: Laura Waddington: La caméra clandestine (French original)
“Whether working at the borders of reality and fiction or directly engaging with the fate of refugees, the director bears witness, in her own way, to the lives of those denied a voice … Her cinema is the reflection of a generous soul.”
Pascal Mieszala, Plan Rapproché, no. 100, Vendôme
Read interview: Laura Waddington: La vidéaste de l’errance (English translation)
Read interview: Laura Waddington: La vidéaste de l’errance (French original)
“Waddington added … “I don’t actually see how you could make a piece about politics and question the system without also questioning the images that show it.” She elaborated on the film’s length: “I really held the images for so long, I think almost to the point of boredom; and this was very important to me because it was really a question of how do I communicate to people the boredom of the fields? It was just hours and hours of waiting, and the idea of going nowhere… And I tried to communicate that not only through the length of the shots, but also with the music.”… When an audience member asked Waddington if she worried about her piece being aestheticized and “too beautiful,” she reflected: “I think you cannot prejudge audiences… You can only make a film which is you, which is most honest to you… Only by being you, will you speak to the few people that you hope to, because in the end what speaks to people, is some form of sincerity.””
Dispatch: Closing Night – December 10 Flaherty NYC (Live Like a Refugee: On The Border), The Flaherty website
“In delicate work, Waddington leads us through a sort of fictional-documentary pact … to recognise them by means of her voice, her capacity for sharing, and her empathy (an extension, ultimately, of all of us). But she takes this even further by making her imagistic gesture a gesture of revolt, as Camus reflected on those who share prisons—a selfless revolt that recognises an injustice suffered by another, even a possible adversary. This unfolds to an even greater degree in her use of imagery, almost always in extreme zoom, threatening to blur everything—people, cars, roads. I think that, on the edge and in a dream, we can allow ourselves (and I would say, we should demand) what is blurred, what can blur: the very notion of border, margin, edge.”
Guilherme Gontijo Flores, Coletivo Praxis, Brazil
Read article: Sobre Border de Laura Waddington (Portuguese original)
“Like wandering and stalked ghosts, evoking the sleepwalkers who wander through German Expressionist cinema, left to themselves, seeking elevation and always ready to fall… The manner of filming the refugees reflects the denial of identity that operates in these places, and the feeling of loss of identity which occurs for those individuals who live the reality in their flesh. As the director says in Sangatte, she felt that she was in a totally de-humanized place, where the refugees were running like shadows through the fields, “I tried to represent them as such.” “
Chloé Belloc, La Furia Umana, Italy
Read essay: Matière de frontière / Frontière de la matière Épisode I (French original)
“Laura Waddington describes this daily struggle of people from war-torn regions of Iraq and Afghanistan, in search of a new place to live, as “a perverse game of cat and mouse,” one that many pay for with mutilated limbs or even death on the railway tracks. As in nearly all her works, Waddington maintains a distance; the images and sounds take on a life of their own, unfolding an absurd tableau. Yet, her voice-over conveys profound compassion. The dedication at the end of Border reads, “For those I met.” Only once, during a direct confrontation between the police and the refugees, do the faces of the opposing parties become visible, reflecting the hopelessness of the struggle for both sides.”
Oliver Rahayel, Film Dienst, Bonn
“Laura Waddington has recently found a far more compelling and radical form in her experimental video work Border (2004). Border also shows the reality of refugee camps and the desperate attempts to flee from France to England. An intimate short film, composed of blurred and slowed nocturnal shots of lost figures whose faces cannot be recognized. Accompanied the personal commentary of the filmmaker who reflects on her own stay in the border zone, it poses the question of how to represent an intangible process. In the light of ‘Border’, which makes an urgent attempt to create an open, political form, the issues with Lioret’s film, which is primarily fascinated by the dramatic potential of the subject matter, become even more clear.”
Daniel Nehm, Welcome – Kritik, www.critic.de, Germany.
“The totally astonishing work of a young woman, who during several months in 2002, glued to her mini DV, captured images of Afghan and Iraqi refugees, around the Sangatte Red Cross camp, who were trying to cross the channel tunnel to England. Laura Waddington recounts her experience through images she transforms without complacency, using slow motion, breaks in sound, a grainy picture and heightened contrasts. Through form, she lends the drama unfolding before our eyes a completely new dimension, revealing the concept of cruelty, beneath a chance beauty, nonetheless extremely real.”
Olivier Bombarda, Le documentaire à Belfort, ARTE television website, France
“Disturbing, visually disjointed and haunting. Its visual impact… lies somewhere between sleeping and waking, dream and nightmare.”
James Drew, Running with the Refugees, The Bulletin, Brussels
“Far removed from familiar reportage formats, the director confronts us with unusual images of a political tragedy. As a person crossing the borders between the visible and the invisible herself, she gives a profile to the shadowy faces of people living in darkness”
Statement of the Ecumenical Jury, 51st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen
“Border makes a strong political statement and at the same time finds a convincing form to do so. While Laura Waddington supplies but the most necessary information she offers a large amount of high quality experience. Neither are the protagonists individualized nor is the drama of their fate made into a story but on the contrary is strongly reduced. The images speak for themselves in a visual language emanating from Waddington’s own experience of having spent ample time with the refugees. By means of an ever so slight formal alienation her film is taken out of the context of documentary news and is given a lyrical quality”
International Jury Statement, First Prize Videoex 2005 – International Experimental Film and Video Festival, Zürich
“Laura Waddington (1970, also honoured with a retrospective of her work) literally opened her eye, the lens of her tiny DV camera for thousands of refugees and illegal immigrants that reside in the French Red Cross camp at Sangatte. The searchlights cut the darkness into pieces, shadows appear and disappear, the mere shades of human beings that often more than two year before fled from Irak or Afghanistan. Hour after hour they try to escape from the camp, hoping to enter the Chunnel and cross their final border, between France and England. The images from Border contain a silent and sad beauty that does not need to be understood. They pilot you in something more essential: the actual experience of sweat, cold and alienation.”
Dana Linssen, Time, Duration, History, FIPRESCI report on the 51st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen
“The best film in international competition Border shows refugees on the French side of the Eurotunnel. They dive in and out of fields and through the night like shadows in slow motion, filmed with a simple tourist camera. The only faces we see clearly, for a brief moment, are those of the police, who strike them during a demonstration.”
Christof Meueler, Junge Welt, Berlin
“The footage of refugees on the move, recorded by a small video camera, imprints small points of light in the darkness. Captured on video, the movement of people trying to cross a border is a flash, the record of light in migratory motion.”
Silvia Hayashi, Montagem audiovisual: Reflexões e experiências, Polytheama Editora, São Paulo
“A look at Waddington’s film in fact reveals the point that Didi-Huberman sees as admirable: the desperate endeavours of the beings who are imperfect and unstable but living with desires that can be thwarted by no powerful Other can be sensed in the violently jolting video images of poor quality. My applause to Waddington’s incomparably remarkable ability to express them in her work of art. Suddenly, Ham’s aforementioned currently on-going work intersects with Waddington’s Border in my mind. In Border by Waddington it is made visible that desires for freedom intrinsic to humanity nestle in the shadows/weakness/pains of the world that are unknown and invisible to us. Yet Ham is all alone enduring the impossibility of her current work—that is the impossibility of capturing the desire for existential liberation and life-risking actual acts of those attempting to defect from North Korea.”
Kang Sumi, I Can’t See. An Aesthetics of Some and Such: Kyungah Ham’s Impossible Art, Korea Artist Prize, Seoul
“When a France, that is helmeted and dressed in blue, treats the voyager as a barbarian, the precarious beauty of a silhouette on the horizon becomes a shout, a weapon… Border is a vulnerable film and it is this quality which makes it a film resistant to the cold, the humidity and the barbarity of the police.”
Antoni Collot, Manéci: Le Journal des Ecrans Documentaires, France
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