Prague-based filmmaker Helena Třeštíková has been filming marriage stories since the early 1980s, resulting in several long-term documentaries. Ivana and Václav’s everlasting marriage covenant is the subject of observation in this episode, which ranges from the day before the wedding to the present day. Back then, in December 1980, Ivana is 21 years old and Václav 24. Both study architecture and marry “because we like each other. And other things. Things better not talked about.” The first child is born shortly after the wedding. Třeštíková is obviously attracted to certain places she keeps returning to, but mostly to people and the way they try to give their lives meaningful directions. In this “Marriage Story”, we discern an incredible desire for expansion and growth which becomes evident in an accumulation of objects, children and responsibilities – one of the underlying motives of the Strnads’ marriage which gradually unfolds over 35 years together.

Carolin Weidner, DOK Leipzig Catalogue 2017

 

Among hundreds of hours of unseen 1980s footage documenting the rehabilitation of Aubervilliers, a Parisian working-class suburb, filmmaker Giuseppe Schillaci recognised 15-year-old French-Algerian Fatsah Bouyahmed, then an ordinary boy who would later become an actor. Suffering memory loss after an accident, Fatsah agrees to revisit the neighbourhood he always wanted to leave through the archival footage. As the images are decoded, two recoveries of memory converge: Fatsah’s life and that of a 1980s working-class suburb. His stories of family and neighbours bring faces and lives out of the archival anonymity. A fluid dialogue between past and present, VHS footage and television archives, and fragments of Fatsah’s memory recreates the visual texture of the 80s while resurrecting forms of togetherness that, seen today, feel improbable.French and immigrant residents shared a belief in the common good through community work, neighbourhood TV, football, rap contests and collective efforts to improve life, as officials involved them in measures to tackle the “malaise of the suburbs.” A forgotten collective struggle, suspended between nostalgia, the elusive truth of memory and socio-politics, before the already lurking racism, segregation and economic inequalities hardened and later erupted in the rage of the banlieues. By connecting one man’s recovered memory to the unheard working-class voices Schillaci subtly plants a doubt: has our belief in the inevitability of today’s unjust realities made those forms of solidarity seem utopian, and is a better future still possible?

Anca Păunescu