double bill #32

The two Belgian productions that make up this double-bill set look at the asymmetries of power between racially distinct peoples as they cross borders. Despite being released ten years apart, the films reflect similar difficulties in international transit. They question the colonial legacies that drive modern immigration systems, including how borders have continued to perform care and control. In these films, bodies dance, drown, and pose with statuesque stillness while navigating statutory techniques of Othering.

In Laura Vandewynckel’s animation Paradise (2014), Javanese shadow puppets illustrate how mobility privilege works. While a white man easily travels to a continent in the Global South, indulges in hospitality, and returns to his comfortable life in a private jet, a racialised body remains splayed and exhausted, at that damned airport checkpoint—his movement restricted by assumptions and categories imposed on him before he even arrives.

3723 KM As the Crow Flies (2024) zooms into biometric facial recognition—the Greek government’s essential requisite for migrants trying to obtain residence permits. Set in Athens, filmmakers Oksana Luyssen and Ysé Auguste-Dormeuil follow a few people as they navigate this bureaucratic rigmarole. Thoughts around the racial biases attendant to such a rigid system are mapped against the imperfect contours of white marble statues, whose facades are corroded, chipped, or fractured. Unlike these statues, living bodies carry a persistent burden of proof and are perpetually answerable to the state’s machinery of marginalisation.

The films share this restlessness at such an injustice, and offer, through different vantage points, an image of this apparatus through the bodies traversing it.