International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam

Synopsis

It is almost impossible to know what war feels like unless you have actually experienced it yourself. Tim Hetherington spent many years reporting from war and conflict zones all over the world, before suddenly realizing that his conventional reports didn't offer him any opportunity to show how surreal it is to be sitting safely at home one moment and under fire in Afghanistan the next. In this short, associative visual diary, he makes an attempt to convey that feeling. The atmosphere created by a succession of images that evoke both contradictions and similarities is more important than a precise description of a particular place or sequence of events. We see jerky fragments of car journeys in various locations; a soldier who is much too young carrying a gun that is much too big; situations in which suppressed violence threatens to come to the surface; people shooting at one another; women weeping and gesticulating wildly. But also a pastoral scene somewhere in England, a BBC news report on a conflict somewhere in the world, and New York's yellow cabs. The images are sometimes inverted, fragments are rewound and sound added, or taken away.