Edouard Beau – ENSP 2011
“November 2007. I have been asked to go and film a Kurdish battalion of the Iraqi army. This battalion is located in Mossoul. I have 48 hours to make a decision. I decide to go. There, a friend gives me his old Hi8 camera with ten tapes. I am a photographer. I have never filmed anything. I have never seen War. For a whole month, I remain close to these soldiers and I film their everyday life, in spite of everything. Long stops, endless wanderings through the city, looking for untraceable terrorists”, this is how Édouard Beau describes the shooting of his first film.
What is to be seen? Zealous policemen on business, even if they end up empty handed. The stunning proximity of images doesn’t spare us any of their harrowing brutality, the beatings, the yelling, an exhausted city, houses violently violated, terrifying searches, fear that reigns and quashes everyone. All of this is present, echoing the last De Palma film. But although it’s a first feature, no amateurism is to be found here. While the shadow of news report and the hunt for the spectacular may put this enterprise at risk, something else is proposed here. The action in this film takes place in one day, from sunrise till sunset. The film constructs its own temporality. Which one? That of a law that wants to absorb chaos. In reality, it is chaos that is absorbing law.
Jean Pierre Rehm, artistic director of the FID in Marseille.
Édouard Beau
Born in 1982 in Nevers. Lives and works in Paris.Édouard Beau practices documentary photography, questioning the human condition, and migratory flows and their causes. From the Sangatte refugee camp in 2002 to Mosul in 2007, where he spent time with a Kurdish unit of the regular Iraqi Army, he creates still images and videos caught on the fly during encounters and events. He then allows the images to settle during a period in which he analyses this chaotic system in order to question our relationship with the Other, the media and the world, at the crossroads of geopolitical analysis, humanitarian commitment and poetic perception. Searching for Hassan received the French Competition First Film Prize at FIDMarseille and the Jury’s Film Long Award at the 7th Aljazeera International Documentary Film Festival in Doha, Qatar, in 2010. In 2011, he graduated from the ENSP of Arles. Having himself escaped the explosion of an IED during his trip to Mosul in 2007, in the summer of 2011, he realised a photographic and video essay about post-traumatic stress suffered by American veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq during an exchange programme with the International Center of Photography in New York City.
