A library that inhabits two sides of a border, as a space that houses stories as close as they are far apart and that becomes a meeting point, in a central way. A reflection on the (im)permeability of borders.
45th Parallel (referring to the 45th US president, Donald Trump) is the most playful of the films by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, from whom we have already screened Rubber Coated Steel (2017) and Walled Unwalled (2019). Each of these films focuses on a legal problem: distinguishing the sound of a rubber bullet and a metallic one, identifying where the space of privacy begins and ends (with respect to the sound emitting from the domestic environment) and, in the wake of the latter, testing the porosity of that hyper-politicized space, the border. How to assess the jurisdiction of a cross-border murder in the time of communication technologies, and how to cross a border without leaving one’s own country? The director answers these complex questions with a dramaturgy that is as didactic as it is operatic. Long live the simple power of oratory. (Ricardo Vieira Lisboa)
