Border

Press Quotes

• " But the shock of the (Locarno film) festival is the cinema of Laura Waddington, 34 years old, English, she lived illegally in New York, then spent a few years travelling with the world's exiles in the most dangerous places. Due to a plane phobia, she made these journeys on buses, cargo ships, hitchhiking. But aside from planes, Laura Waddington is afraid of nothing and her video camera carries all her courage and her conscience. Slung across her shoulder. Border is the trace of the months she spent in Sangatte, hidden in the fields, each night, with Afghan and Iraqi refugees. Shot secretly, the shutter wide open, almost in slow motion, the images create an aesthetic experience of fear, of terror, as if fallen out of a nightmare, peopled with out of focus figures. Border links the fields of Sangatte to that terrified part of our imagination, hidden deep within all of us. "
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  Philippe Azoury, LIBERATION, Paris

• " A thousand miles away from the television reports that vainly try to give a hypothetical identity to these displaced bodies, Laura Waddington’s desperate camera scrupulously avoids the refugees’ faces to convey an animal condition, a status of hunted beasts. Nothing predatory, no social dogma, just real empathy in this worried and audacious filming. And if the image is superb, at times pushing Border towards the boundaries of video dance and thus annoying certain guards of the temple of ethics, this is primarily due to a technical necessity, the DV camera’s shutter wide open to compensate for the lack of light, resulting in a large trembling grain, an impression of slow motion, movements like so many imprints. "
  

  Bertrand Loutte, LES INROCKUPTIBLES, Paris

• " Subtle and powerful, the work of this English filmmaker, nomadic observer of the world and devoted translator of fear and hope, as in the film Border (International Competition/ Special Mention) a tragic document about the powerless attempts of Afghan and Iraqi refugees to escape from France to England and the violent police repression that followed the closure of the camp of Sangatte. "
  

  Elena Marcheschi, IL MANIFESTO, Italy

• " It was in 2002: the illegality of the situation, the police lieing in wait, the race through the fields, the omnipresence of the night lit only by the danger of helicopter searchlights, all that gives her film’s images their condition of invisibility, but also, more powerfully a proximity to these men, these women and these children whose features we hardly see - whose desperate clamours we hear at a moment when faced with the police– but of who the film manages to construct, admirably, like a poem, their dignity. "
  

  Georges Didi-Huberman, DICTIONNAIRE MONDIAL DES IMAGES

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