CARGO: 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 hallucinatory colours) but most of all, through her voice over, she gives these men an exemplary humanity and dignity.”
Olivier Nicklaus, Les Inrockuptibles, Paris
Read article: Les yeux de Laura (English translation)
Read article: Les yeux de Laura (French original)
“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 Cinémathèque Française, 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, 48th International Short Film Festival 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.”
8th New York Video Festival, Film Society of Lincoln Center program notes
“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 … 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.”
Bouchra Khalili, The 51st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen Catalogue, Germany
Read catalogue essay: The Pain of Seeing (English translation)
“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 – International Experimental Film and Video Festival, Zürich
“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.”
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)
“And they were living like prisoners, without the papers to go ashore,” the voice-over tells us. “It was as if we lived the world with the curtains drawn.” So much so that, even though the movement here is physical, the artist produces in her film narrative more of a mental journey, woven into this interstice of suspended time, conveying the feeling of abandonment that she bears witness to.”
Marion Hohlfeldt, Journal d’Exposition: Galerie Art & Essai, no. 12, Rennes
Read essay excerpt: Alternatives to Memories (English translation)
Read essay excerpt: Alternatives to Memories (French original)
“The ship appears, in analogous fashion to Zone, as a liminal space in which individuals assume different natures than how they would behave on land. The ship escapes the ordinary and predictable world and thus—as Michel Agier writes of refugee camps—is no longer a place, but a “mere space”. “What survives and becomes stronger when people are obliged to abandon all that had previously defined them?” is the question that the filmmaker herself poses during her stay there.”
Cecilia Bima, Lacune visive: Bassa definizione per un’etica della testimonianza
Read chapter : Cargo: distanza e lacuna, luoghi di produzione del sensibile (English translation)
“Laura Waddington’s art goes beyond merely bearing witness to reality. Whether she is scrutinizing the shadows … or focusing on the faces of men adrift (the sailors of Cargo seem to have stepped straight out of a novel, a feeling heightened by the tone of the voice-over), her video camera transports us to a dimension where time no longer holds sway. It is a sensory experience during which we become sailors without a port or refugees of the night. Ghosts wandering over the surface of our Earth.”
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)
“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.”
Cecilia Bima, Lacune visive: Bassa definizione per un’etica della testimonianza
Read chapter : Cargo: distanza e lacuna, luoghi di produzione del sensibile (English translation)
“The entire film is blurred, slowed down, or in freeze-frame, offering a poetic depiction of the journey. The young woman recounts her feelings and the stories that she hears and observes, allowing the audience to drift between reality and inner world. The uncertain and forgotten lives of the crew create a sense of yearning for the peace and stability of life on land. She had always imagined that life at sea meant freedom, but when she found herself surrounded by cargo and huge shipping containers, she realised that she hadn’t really visited anywhere at all. This was a journey without a destination.”
Ki Wong, Cream Magazine, Hong Kong
Read article: Cargo and Short Interview with Laura Waddington (English translation)
Read article: Cargo and Short Interview with Laura Waddington (Chinese original)
“Cargo deals with the existential status of being on the road, of going from a to b, arriving and leaving, going away and returning home again, and everything in-between. It deals with the short-lived meetings with people underway who then disappear out of your life”
Christel Vesters, The 19th World Wide Video Festival Catalogue, Amsterdam
“This is also the case in Cargo, where she travels from Venice to the Middle East on a container ship, spending a few weeks as the only woman among sailors, some of whom have spent several years at sea without extended shore leave. Here, too, Waddington has distilled a few moments from the journey, stretching them to the point where they nearly reach stillness, becoming like photographs; here, again, the voice-over reflects on the bitterness of others’ lives, in the face of which one’s own worries increasingly fade away. There are only a few brief statements; often the sound cuts out entirely, directing even more attention to the visuals, or the images are underscored by the magnificent minimalist music of Simon Fisher Turner, known for his soundtrack for Derek Jarman’s Blue.”
Oliver Rahayel, Film Dienst, Bonn
“The gaze, the act of looking, might be the secret of Laura Waddington’s films—or perhaps the lack of it? … a stunning, poetic video diary of the sailors’ unbelievably empty lives, which not even karaoke can alleviate.”
Tranzit.hu bemutatja, Irok Boltja, Budapest program notes
“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, New York
“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
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