The Montreal International Documentary Meetings (RIDM) open Wednesday with Preparations for a Miraclefrom Switzerland Tobias Nölle. This hybrid film, combining documentary images and a fictional narrative, is told from the point of view of an android robot visiting contemporary Europe, coming from a future where the human race has become extinct, giving way to machines. In search of existential answers, he tries to understand the characters who cross his path.
The automaton first finds himself at a technology conference, looking for other machines with which he can converse. He is then directed to a demonstration against deforestation, then to the surroundings of the Hambach mine, in Germany, one of the most polluting sites in Europe. The android narrator then sympathizes with activists denouncing the expansion of the mine. The camera, which transports us to the heart of violent clashes with the police, thus exposes the omnipotence of industries and the precariousness of nature in the face of technological development.
Reached by telephone a few days before his stay in Quebec, Tobias Nölle, who had only made fiction until now, explains that he turned to documentaries “out of necessity”. “It’s become a bit of a cliché as a reason, but it was the pandemic that inspired me,” he says. Seeing the world stop around me, I had the idea of interpreting life on Earth from the perspective of an extraterrestrial. To stay active while another project of mine was interrupted, I left my house every day with my camera, wondering how an android would perceive my reality. »
Environmentalist fable
Despite the seriousness of the subjects he addresses, the filmmaker maintains a light tone throughout the film, inserting both poetic and humorous reflections from his narrator between scenes of demonstrations or expropriation of peasants. “During the filming, I had a lot of fun. I could film a single tree for a very long time, for example, focusing first on its aesthetic shapes. »
Tobias Nölle therefore sometimes manages to make us laugh, but we laugh – the desolate landscapes and the monstrous machines of this pre-apocalyptic story reminding us of the imminence of the environmental catastrophes that await us. “I am lucky to lead a privileged life, in a country which is not yet too affected by climate change,” he explains. But while filming what was happening around me, I came across young activists ready to do anything to denounce extractivism, and I found that they were right to be worried. I wanted to express it, without being cynical, always with a certain poetry. »
The fiction director who usually prefers to “keep control” over his stories also had to face the unpredictability of the field. Among other things, because certain demonstrations that he filmed were covered by the media, Tobias Nölle went to the front line, between police officers and activists, unlike the journalists who remained further back. “I was afraid of being poorly received by the young protesters, but when I explained to them that I was an android from the future, they played the game with humor and trusted me, probably more than traditional journalists. »
Hybrid films
Such an approach, although accidental due to the pandemic, reflects a major trend in contemporary documentaries, where elements of fiction are integrated into real shots on the ground. The RIDM has also been offering this type of hybrid film for a long time. Once again this year, they abound in almost all sections of the festival.
The British collective film The Voting Poolshot in super 16 mm, reveals the perceptions of a group of neurodivergent characters, interpreting reality with playfulness and poetry. Hybridity can also correspond to the variety of image sources used. In the movies Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed (Hernán Rosselli), Apple Cider Vinegar (Sofie Benoot) et The room of shadows (Camilo Restrepo) in the international competition, the filmmakers combine family archives or media images with their own documentary scenes.
For Tobias Nölle, hybridity is also an opportunity to “project real world issues into a parallel universe”. “I hope in any case that the subjects that I address in my film, which I certainly could have treated with a purely fictional approach, will have all the more impact in this way. »
