Jean-Luc Fichefet

A finales de los setenta, la música disco, considerada demasiado banal y corriente, había muerto. Pero los DJs y las pistas de baile aún necesitaban nuevos discos y ritmos más rápidos. Construido con sonidos de sintetizador, el estilo hi-nrg (high energy) barrió los clubes gay antes de llegar a las listas de éxitos durante los años ochenta.

¿Cómo una pobre niña negra de Missouri se convirtió en la Reina de París, antes de unirse a la Resistencia Francesa y finalmente crear la familia de sus sueños “La Tribu Arco Iris”, adoptando a doce niños de cuatro rincones del mundo? Esta es la fabulosa historia de la primera superestrella negra, Josephine Baker.

Human beings who have experienced such a strong shock that they are no longer even afraid of death (as it often happens to genocide survivors) sometimes fall into what is known as a feeling of timelessness or a “melancholy”. They live somewhat “outside” time, a mode of extra-temporal existence, waiting for the day on which they will be freed from their suffering. It is the people — almost ghosts having survived the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenians and Azerbaijani that has lasted for almost twenty years — that the filmmaker shows and listens to in his film. Behind them, behind their wandering bodies, behind their frenzies, is what remains of the collapse of the Soviet Union in Caucasus: ruins, uninhabited spaces, tombs, vestiges of war, trenches where soldiers watch for an invisible enemy.

Guided by the sheepbells of a flock and by the evocations of the lost, this film is a voyage through storms; those of the mountains and winter, those of bodies and souls, those which remind us that which nature has not obtained from our reason, obtaining from our madness.

I travelled across Mauritania to find a tree that I saw from my window in Belgium. It wasn't a mythical tree, but rather one that could be anywhere. On my way, I met men and women who shared their perception of this quest and in doing so, in a roundabout way they shared some of their visions of the world and of existence. For some, my tree was the sign from the spirits, of the invisible or a call from light. For others, it was the symbol of a history, a culture or the end of a period in time. For yet others, it was a tree that you see only when you get lost...