WE KNEW HOW BEAUTIFUL THEY WERE, THESE ISLANDS AT THE CPH:DOX Festival 2022

Younes Ben Slimane / Tunisia, France / 2022 / 21 min / World Premiere

A dark and enigmatic ritual in which a solitary figure moves through a desert burial ground. The objects left behind speak their own silent language.

A lone figure digs a grave in the dead of night. With no dialogue – and no sound other than the wind, the crackling of a fire and the scrape of a shovel against dry earth – we are confronted with a dark and mysterious, possibly cursed, universe where every object seems haunted by a meaning we barely sense, but which seem to confirm our anxieties. The head of an old doll, a comb, a lipstick. Relics whose silent language speaks of the end of their former owners. At sea, in the desert. Younes Ben Slimane’s disturbingly beautiful and melancholic imagery is bathed in darkness and in a golden chiaroscuro, lit only by the stars and the lone grave diggers’ headlamps.