A group of French soldiers

Afghanistan, 2012. A group of French soldiers is posted at a remote post in the Wakhan Valley on the Pakistan border. Not much is happening here. The days slip by. The men guard the shifts and monitor the valley and the local village from two lookouts. One day the soldiers have to fire a warning shot, after which their dog disappears, without even thinking about it. It may have just scared the shot, but the next day the dog is still gone, and suddenly the two soldiers from one lookout vanished without a trace. Are they deserted? Have they been shot and the bodies removed? Acting Captain Bonassieu (Jérémie Renier) sets in motion a search that will soon prove far more obscure and fateful than first thought.

To disappear. 31-year-old Frenchman Clément Cogitore has his debut feature film The Wakhan Front (the French title is Ni Le Ciel, Ne La Terre, which can be translated into Neither Heaven, Neither Earth), made a radically different war film. The film successfully blends familiar elements from the war movie with more spiritual and metaphysical sequences.

The Wakhan Front taking part in the side competition Semaine de la Critique during the ongoing Cannes film festival, where I met the director last Sunday and asked him what the motivation has been for creating this distinctive genre mix:

“At a train station, I saw a poster calling for some missing people and I came to think of where those people are. Maybe something happened to them. Maybe they have started a new life somewhere else. But no one disappears completely. They are always finding a place. But then I toyed with the idea that what if someone really just disappeared. That one day they exist, and the next day they no longer exist, ”explains Clément Cogitore, who only later in the process coupled this idea with the idea of ​​making a war movie:

“I had a great urge to start from the way we wage war today. How we try to control everything and use technology to have that control. The soldiers use the technology to monitor the landscape. It is always pictures of the landscape that help to dictate the course of the war. I wanted to explore how the whole concept of disappearance could take its place in that environment, ”explains Cogitore and continues:

«War has historically increased distance. We started by fighting each other hand to hand, then came guns and other weapons, creating the opportunity for greater distance. And today a man can sit in the United States and, like a computer game, control his joystick and slain people on the other side of the globe. At the same time, my film contains a confrontation between two ways of believing. Two ways of approaching reality, which may become all the more diverse, now that war supplies have created such a great distance. ”

Belief systems. In the film, a number of soldiers from the French camp disappear, and the frustration grows as the remaining men realize that their rational approach to reality is no longer sufficient:

“In the West, we have a lot of focus on what can manifest physically. We have to have proof and it has to be physical proof. Otherwise, we have a hard time dealing with it. Then it becomes too incomprehensible or too irrational. Therefore, the soldiers in the film also act primarily by searching for an opinion and rejecting the supernatural. Whatever makes the soldiers disappear has no morals. It makes no judgments about who are villains and heroes. It acts randomly, irrationally and unfairly many people will think, ”explains Clément Cogitore, who does not immediately believe his film contains an explicit political stance:

“For me, politics is what dictates how we live together. The film shows that the villagers in the village, the French soldiers and the Taliban fighters, who are their enemies, all have the same problem. And they all have to deal with this problem. They do so in different ways. The political aspect of the film is probably a recognition that we have different ways of thinking and relating to reality. ”

For Cogitore, the West's mindset also represents just one way of believing that he would like to problematize with his film:

“Our Western world is founded on a belief system, just like more archaic and religious communities. Our democracy is a belief system. Capitalism is a belief system, which, of course, also has its obscure sides, and it can be just as harmful to humanity as any other form of religious fanaticism. "

The western hung for the rational and the physical manifestation is to trace several places in the film. In one scene, for example, it is mentioned how corpses must be filled with soil to increase weight when only a few body parts of dead soldiers have been found. We need the contents of the body bag to at least imitate the weight of a human being.

Language challenges. In his research for the film, Cogitore has interviewed several returning soldiers and examined how the relationship between soldiers and local Afghans is often fate-linked to the many translations that must necessarily take place in the distinctive cultural meeting, such as a war. In the movie, all translations take place in real time. We thus hear both the French pronunciation and the corresponding Afghan. This creates a special tension which helps to establish the insecurity and uncertainty that constantly surrounds the communication, and which the instructor also knows from his previous works:

"I've done some documentaries in countries where I don't know the language. It is a strange situation. You don't know what people are saying. You may feel angry or happy, but you cannot be sure. I wanted the uncertainty as a permanent state in the film. It gives a sense of the sense of loss experienced by the soldiers, "explains Cogitore, who has also heightened the documentary by casting, in the role of military interpreter, the former soldier Sâm Mirhosseini, who just served as interpreter for the French troops in Afghanistan.

Natsyns glasses. In addition to a number of documentaries, Cogitore has a background in contemporary art, where he has created experimental installation art and art photography. This sparse background can also be traced in the film's visual style, where the sight through a night-binoculars turns into an abstract image that is difficult to decode:

"We have kept to use the right military equipment such as binoculars and night vision goggles that we have filmed through. It is therefore the equipment of reality that creates these almost abstract images. After all, despite the high-tech equipment, the soldiers are manipulated because of images. It is difficult to know when to see something and when to see nothing. The night vision goggles should be used by the soldiers to see the truth, but they soon learn that they do not get the truth from the goggles but only some information from which they themselves must interpret and act. Objects and eyes are only one access to perception, and so one has to use thought and belief to piece together their own truth, ”explains the director, who in a particularly magical scene in the film has placed the actors in such a way that we as viewers can only see the French soldiers, and only as the Afghans move do we find that they have been present in the picture all the time.

The Wakhan Front is only going to have a life in the world now, but Cogitore has already shown the film to several soldiers and people within the military, though not without some concern:

"I've been nervous about their reaction. Whether they could relate to my movie at all. But so far, I have only come to a great understanding of the film and its themes. ”

At the time of writing, it is still unknown whether The Wakhan Front is being purchased for Norwegian distribution.

A selection of Clément Cogitores
works can be viewed on the website:
http://clementcogitore.com

Moestrup is a critic in Ny Tid.
moestrup@gmail.com