A film set in different moments: in the 16th century, in a forest, fighting for communal land; then, in a forest being monitored and the confrontation between notions of public and private, with the figure of the wild boar as an agent of chaos.
The French visual artist Elsa Brès returns to IndieLisboa with her first feature, which can be read as a manifesto that continues the poetic struggles of Monique Wittig and Donna Haraway and calls for disobedience. The film invites us into a tactile journey through the landscape and past of the artist’s home region in an open-ended structure where documentary and fiction blend, and meaning is conveyed through gestures rather than words. Brès superimposes the uprising of peasant women against the enclosure of common lands in the 16th century with the modern-day intrusion of wild boars into the privatized and monitored territories of the Cévennes. Night, silence, and the forest emerge as marginal spaces of resilience, where the wild and domestic forge an unlikely alliance against the grip of capital and men, proposing cohabitation as a new form of living.
Anastasia Lukovnikova
