ARCHIVES 2011 / And We Will Burn One by One the Sleeping Cities...

The film-maker Sylvain George first of all embodies a line of conduct. His intransigence is exemplary and, since his beginnings, he has never abandoned it. Intransigence in regard to the world as well as art, asserted at the cost of fiercely waged battles, without any surrender. Attuned to the most immediate present, he is involved in one of the most painful and knottiest issues - the fate of the undocumented immigrant. Having left there, without having arrived anywhere... Sylvain George dared to plunge into what was a modern hell, the hell of Calais, and there, he discovered, he immersed himself, directly, without any mediator, into "the pain of the world." He sounded it, inhabited by an irrepressible revolt. His words, like his images, project us, today, before a pure black, the black of beyond the night. Sylvain George is like the watchman of a night whose unbearable excess he experienced and from which he returned to recount his distress. And thus, as though to modern MacBeths, he makes us lose sleep. Today, after Sylvain George had the great Archie Shepp as a partner, it is Valérie Dréville who, with the courage she is known for, joins this adventure. An actress of every possibility, she dives into Sylvain George's "pure black" to have the echoes heard and to recover the traces of the hell of Calais. Georges Banu

Georges Banu