Sofie Benoot

California City, a planned city in the desert, where a young African-American man dreams of starting a new life. Documentary impressions, mobile phone videos, diary entries and Google Maps views are combined into a portrait of this otherworldly place.

California City, a planned city in the desert, where a young African-American man dreams of starting a new life. Documentary impressions, mobile phone videos, diary entries and Google Maps views are combined into a portrait of this otherworldly place.

California City, a planned city in the desert, where a young African-American man dreams of starting a new life. Documentary impressions, mobile phone videos, diary entries and Google Maps views are combined into a portrait of this otherworldly place.

The American West. We have arrived in a world where human life would seem to be impossible: an arid, mythical landscape characterized by absence. Absence of water, trees, life. In the beginning there was nothing. But then traces start appearing. Desert Haze tells the many layered story of human presence in the American Desert.

Following the Mississippi River from Cairo, Illinois to Venice, Louisiana, Blue Meridian is a captivating journey through the dilapidated and worn out Deep South of the United States of America. A cinematographic encounter with people living among the traces of natural disasters, economic decline and a turbulent history. The Mississippi River flows both through the Deep South and the imagination of the American nation; it draws the border between the East and the West of the country, but also the division between the North and the South. As a blue meridian, it represents the complex relation between place and identity in North America. The film portrays people living in the decay of semi abandoned places, who try to rebuild, preserve and survive, in an attempt to take a stand in their land and its history. Flooding, civil rights movement riots, racism, real estate speculation have caused people to leave these towns and cities.