Official Competition 2018

Also Known as Jihadi

Éric Baudelaire I 2017 I 102'

SYNOPSIS

The path to radicalism of a young man from France to Syria, and back to France, where he is incarcerated for allegedly joining Daesh, is rendered purely through a series of landscape shots filmed at the locations tra- versed by the subject.

BIOGRAPHY

Éric Baudelaire

ÉRIC BAUDELAIRE (United States, 1973) is a French filmmaker and visual artist. His films such as Letters to Max (2014), The Ugly One (2013) and The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi have been shown at prestigious festivals around the world, and his research work has also taken the form of installations, photographs and performances.

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Critical text

The career of Eric Baudelaire is strongly linked to the filmic and vital trajectory of Masao Adachi, Japanese director of eventful existence that he has approached both from a biographical and from a aesthetic point of view. In his latest film, the author of Letters to Max (2014) appropriates the ‘adachian’ landscape theory to shoot a thriller empty of characters. The camera travels from France to Syria and back to the Gallic country, chasing the places where a young man went to enlist in the ISIS, while different court documents try to contextualize that decision and its consequences. The subtractive work of Baudelaire does not diminish any of the tension from a film whose dramatic crescendo ends up being suffocating and which, through the absence/presence dichotomy, asks how it is possible that the abominable germinates in an environment deprived of any connotation. As A.K.A. Serial Killer (Masao Adachi, 1969) already did, A.K.A. Jihadi revolutionizes genre film with a new formal and, by extension, political approach.
ENRIC ALBERO

Technical Sheet