More than anything Inner Lines, selected for International Competition, sends out a message of displacement and of disorientation – both geographically and mentally. It is an artful film, but dealing with the Yazidi genocide it is far from an easy watch.
The inner lines of the title refer to military terminology; they are parallel trails near enemy lines serving as escape routes. But the prologue also speaks of inner lines as interior paths, places where our sorrow resides. And there is a lot of sorrow to reside there – pain and suffering as high as the mountain Ararat where ‘messengers and their carrier pigeons travel along these parallel paths to meet up with communities in the grip of war’.
Filmmaker Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd picked up a 16mm camera to convey his thoughts on the genocide – with references to the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish War of Independence and the Nagorno-Karabakh war in 2020. Maybe he wanted the material to reflect the authenticity of the horrific and heart-breaking testimonies given in the film – never by talking heads, but in voice-over, in text over shots of landscapes, villages and people.
It leaves you slightly disoriented, not knowing if the ones you see are the ones talking, or if the places shown are the actual crime scenes. The feeling of disorientation is heightened by the editing – there seems neither chronology nor desire/need to apply a discernible order in the display of the images.
The film starts with flickering black and white shots of faces, briefly lighting up only to disappear just as quickly into darkness again. A whispering voice speaks in poetic verses of the inner lines and white light, which ‘appears in darkness’ and ‘still exists invisible in a broken world’.
The beauty of the images seem to contradict the accounts of the victims of countless cruelties inflicted on the Yazidi people by the Daesh, the Islamic State. The stories of beheadings, rapes, killing of infants and women being sold into slavery keep coming, like an endless stream. Maybe the beauty we see is an attempt to offer solace, like the songs and the music in the film, the soothing rituals of lighting candles and the dances. It might be the only way to deal with these completely senseless outbursts of hate and violence, committed in the name of religion.
Hope has the shape of a pretty young woman, who reappears throughout the film, walking along these invisible trails with her doves, the biblical symbol for hope after a catastrophe. It is a much needed glimmer of white light in this accumulation of misery, which cannot but weigh heavy on the viewer. This feeling of heaviness is of course merely a fraction of the grief and sorrow the subjects in the documentary must have felt and still feel. That’s why Inner Lines is an important document on the continuing hurt people inflict on each other and on the lasting impact it has on the victims.
France/Belgium, 2022, 87 mins
Dir: Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd
Languages: Armenian/Turkish (subtitles: French/English)
Sales: Les Films d’Ici Méditerranée
