SAINTS’GAME

There are periods of strong awareness of the sacred, and periods of desacralization. The film begins with an image, fed by the artist's own obsession with iconic representations, especially those of Christian saints. Revolving around these images, while the actors replay (or mimic) scenes symbolizing saints, Amélie Derlon Cordina questions them about their attempts and desire to break with their own cultural and religious heritage.

If the 20th century postulated the death of God, while artistic currents attempted with ever more abstract and iconoclastic transgressions to completely complete His image, it is clear today that nothing is completed and that everything remains to be solved.

Pretty quickly in the dramaturgy of the film, it becomes clear that each character is an immigrant: a Palestinian, a Daghestanese, an Icelander and a Frenchman. They each come from a different cultural and religious background, and are not necessarily familiar with Christian representations. It is a question, not of confronting our inheritances, but of sharing our respective attempts and wills to separate ourselves, both literally and figuratively, from what we have come from. In this film, Derlon Cordina wishes to talk about 'images' in the broadest sense possible: visual, religious, social, and even political memory, especially for those who have known war as is the case for two of the three central characters. We shall return to those images and gestures which have marked us, and of which we have become the experience and the trace. But no one ever completely destroys his/her roots, and the transcendent survives better in images than anywhere else.

This film brings together moments of backstage, discussions, rehearsals and stagings, providing different levels of reading. And at the same time, the viewer can witness the making of the film itself. Everything took place in Brussels. This geographical precision makes sense: this city, a European and multicultural capital, is - perhaps more than anywhere else in the world - infused with an imperfect disinheritance which leads to wandering. Brussels is a symbol of modernity, a city of cultural wanderers, a city of foreigners.