It Happened Just Before

In the first person point of view, five characters recount brutal stories of human trafficking that they have not experienced. This is the initial shift, as the words of some of them are incorporated into the bodies of others.  

Kurz davor ist es passiert. It happened just before. The grammatical tense for telling these stories is the past tense, while at the same time, the future tense is also heard, like a second shift. Es wird passiert sein. It will have happened, as we know that these stories of sexual and domestic slavery will be repeated.

Then comes the third shift, the one that makes us oscillate between the two films within this film: the one we see before us and the one that we can only hear and imagine. The latter, the invisible film is the most important one, the most serious. A certain documentary tradition has accustomed us to "follow the characters" and to show them from all angles, in all positions. In this film, in its images at least, the protagonists will remain in the background. Nevertheless, they are no less present, no less powerful, because they come to possess the bodies we see on the screen and haunt the film with their stories, just like they haunt our collective guilty conscience.

 

Emanuel Licha
Filmmaker and teacher