The More Particular
Three films on the ongoingness of the now
Hannah Bonner
Bamssi
Director MOURAD BEN AMOR
Year
2024
Country TUNISIA, BELGIUM
Unreachable Object
Director FANFAN ZHOU
Year
2024
Country
US
Une Âne
Director
EITAN EFRAT & SIRAH FOIGHEL
Year
2023
Country BELGIUM
A car hurtles through a sunswept
desert, the camera trembling like an eyelid along the bumpy, gravel road, no
landmarks, no buildings, just cloudless sky and a vast expanse of stones. As
the unseen filmmaker travels into the region, the audience sits in the present
participle; the film becomes a continuous tense action, a point-of-view shot
guiding us to an unknown destination.
This opening sequence, from Eitan Efrat and Sirah Foighel Brutmann’s Un Âne, is both a tribute to, and critique of, Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (2015). Towards the end of Un Âne, a voice over states: “Dear Chantal, we’re here in the desert where you filmed.” Though this is a landscape Akerman chose not to name or locate in her final film, Efrat and Brutmann have traced Akerman’s route. For Akerman, the desert could be anyplace, but for Efrat and Brutmann, this location has been a place “of continuous erasure” since 1948.
Akerman once said, “I have thought that the more particular I am the more I address the general.” As Un Âne’s speaker continues, darkness slowly begins to fall. Night performs the very erasure of visibility that vexes these filmmakers. Out of the shadows, the titular white donkey shimmers silver, almost solar, as the narrator lists: “The erasure of roads, plants, water sources, of knowledge, histories and livelihoods of Palestinian Bedouin communities.” Here, Un Âne names the community that Akerman generalized as ‘Al-Naqab’, a community with a specific history and socio-political present, a community that must be named at the risk of vanishing completely due to the Israeli government’s ongoing genocide of civilians in Gaza.
‘Unreachable Objects’ is a programme preoccupied with the construction and destruction of both narrative and memory. Mourad Ben Amor’s debut film Bamssi was made in dialogue with his cousin Fairuz Ghammam, a filmmaker based in Belgium, while Fanfan Zhou’s participatory and performative documentary Unreachable Object is in dialogue with her mother, whose sister died years ago. In all three projects, the use of handheld cameras lends the films a formal immediacy and intimacy, the camera becoming a direct extension and effusion of the directors’ memories, perspectives, and being.
In Bamssi, that capacious gaze, ever wayward, ever searching for connection, lingers on the most unassuming of details, like the titular dog Bamssi licking Queen, the white cat, or chasing his tail on the rooftop. Amor suggests there are still possibilities for revelatory moments, even in an ordinary life. Farm animals bumble about; nature programmes drone on the television. Taking Bamssi out on a walk, Amor spins his camera around and around, dizzily drinking in an overcast sky.
While Amor revels in the everyday, Zhou turns her attention to performance and re-enactment in an attempt to understand her mother’s life which is only ever available to her through recollection. Unreachable Object opens with an image of an actress taking photos with other cast members after a show. The camera zooms out once, twice, in effort to capture all the crew in the shot, the shaky frame indicative of a home movie aesthetic. “She’s my mom,” Zhou states in voice over. “She’s an opera performer … I like watching her.” Only minutes later Zhou clarifies, “I’ve told you she is my mom, but I didn’t tell you she is just playing my mom. She is not my mom.” From the beginning, Zhou asks us to not ascribe empirical truth to this project, but rather, to understand each image as a representation of one possible version of reality. Like memory, our understanding of reality is thorny and opaque. Zhou’s project becomes an effort to push through the brambles of time towards some kind of clearing, an attempt to bring the past into the present, to embody memory as it manifests here, even as it grapples with veracity.
Out of this effort and resultant desire, Zhou, Amor, Brutmann’s and Efrat offer snapshots of the ongoingness of the now. Animals dozing or lapping their young, fragments of news reports from a television in another room, or the bulbous heads of camels foraging for brush amidst an arid terrain. In these quiet, quotidian moments, the filmmakers inspect their environs with deliberate care. Though we hurtle through space in the opening of Un Âne, each film in this programme slows us down. “We must accept [life] and must try to change it,” Bamssi states. This duality, acceptance and effort, is the underlying ethos of each of these films. Psychic, spiritual, and political liberation may be possible, but previous narratives are only altered by the creation of new stories.
Hannah Bonner's criticism has appeared in Literary Hub, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Reverse Shot, and Senses of Cinema. Her first collection of poems, Another Woman (2024), was published by EastOver Press. She lives in Iowa.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the programme ‘Unreachable Objects’ at Rich Mix, 7 May 2025.
This opening sequence, from Eitan Efrat and Sirah Foighel Brutmann’s Un Âne, is both a tribute to, and critique of, Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (2015). Towards the end of Un Âne, a voice over states: “Dear Chantal, we’re here in the desert where you filmed.” Though this is a landscape Akerman chose not to name or locate in her final film, Efrat and Brutmann have traced Akerman’s route. For Akerman, the desert could be anyplace, but for Efrat and Brutmann, this location has been a place “of continuous erasure” since 1948.
Akerman once said, “I have thought that the more particular I am the more I address the general.” As Un Âne’s speaker continues, darkness slowly begins to fall. Night performs the very erasure of visibility that vexes these filmmakers. Out of the shadows, the titular white donkey shimmers silver, almost solar, as the narrator lists: “The erasure of roads, plants, water sources, of knowledge, histories and livelihoods of Palestinian Bedouin communities.” Here, Un Âne names the community that Akerman generalized as ‘Al-Naqab’, a community with a specific history and socio-political present, a community that must be named at the risk of vanishing completely due to the Israeli government’s ongoing genocide of civilians in Gaza.
‘Unreachable Objects’ is a programme preoccupied with the construction and destruction of both narrative and memory. Mourad Ben Amor’s debut film Bamssi was made in dialogue with his cousin Fairuz Ghammam, a filmmaker based in Belgium, while Fanfan Zhou’s participatory and performative documentary Unreachable Object is in dialogue with her mother, whose sister died years ago. In all three projects, the use of handheld cameras lends the films a formal immediacy and intimacy, the camera becoming a direct extension and effusion of the directors’ memories, perspectives, and being.
In Bamssi, that capacious gaze, ever wayward, ever searching for connection, lingers on the most unassuming of details, like the titular dog Bamssi licking Queen, the white cat, or chasing his tail on the rooftop. Amor suggests there are still possibilities for revelatory moments, even in an ordinary life. Farm animals bumble about; nature programmes drone on the television. Taking Bamssi out on a walk, Amor spins his camera around and around, dizzily drinking in an overcast sky.
While Amor revels in the everyday, Zhou turns her attention to performance and re-enactment in an attempt to understand her mother’s life which is only ever available to her through recollection. Unreachable Object opens with an image of an actress taking photos with other cast members after a show. The camera zooms out once, twice, in effort to capture all the crew in the shot, the shaky frame indicative of a home movie aesthetic. “She’s my mom,” Zhou states in voice over. “She’s an opera performer … I like watching her.” Only minutes later Zhou clarifies, “I’ve told you she is my mom, but I didn’t tell you she is just playing my mom. She is not my mom.” From the beginning, Zhou asks us to not ascribe empirical truth to this project, but rather, to understand each image as a representation of one possible version of reality. Like memory, our understanding of reality is thorny and opaque. Zhou’s project becomes an effort to push through the brambles of time towards some kind of clearing, an attempt to bring the past into the present, to embody memory as it manifests here, even as it grapples with veracity.
Out of this effort and resultant desire, Zhou, Amor, Brutmann’s and Efrat offer snapshots of the ongoingness of the now. Animals dozing or lapping their young, fragments of news reports from a television in another room, or the bulbous heads of camels foraging for brush amidst an arid terrain. In these quiet, quotidian moments, the filmmakers inspect their environs with deliberate care. Though we hurtle through space in the opening of Un Âne, each film in this programme slows us down. “We must accept [life] and must try to change it,” Bamssi states. This duality, acceptance and effort, is the underlying ethos of each of these films. Psychic, spiritual, and political liberation may be possible, but previous narratives are only altered by the creation of new stories.
Hannah Bonner's criticism has appeared in Literary Hub, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Reverse Shot, and Senses of Cinema. Her first collection of poems, Another Woman (2024), was published by EastOver Press. She lives in Iowa.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the programme ‘Unreachable Objects’ at Rich Mix, 7 May 2025.