The near-death experience explored in a docudrama. “Witnesses”, by Sonia Barkallah will be screened on Saturday November 23 at 7:30 p.m. at the Mégacastillet cinema in Perpignan in the Pyrénées-Orientales in the presence of the director.
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These are called NDEs, Near Death Experiences. An experience on the borders of death, on the borders of consciousness. More than 300 million people around the world, including 2.7 million in France, say they have been confronted with it. A subject that has fascinated director Sonia Barkallah for a very long time.
Near-death experiences have never ceased to fascinate me since I read, at the age of 11, the bestselling book “Life After Life” by Doctor Raymond Moody, a work I discovered inadvertently . I know how much these testimonies have played a big role in my existence, both humanly and in my vocation to become a director.
Sonia Barkallah, director
Fourteen years after her first film “False Start”, which already questioned the subject, director Sonia Barkallah returns with a new opus which this time takes the form of an investigation submitting the testimonies of intriguing cases to the opinion of different scientists and doctors.
I needed tangible evidence and I wanted to go further than traditional witnesses. So I focused my film on the witnesses of the witnesses. For example, I met caregivers who were able to confirm what their patients said by, for example, reproducing a telephone conversation word for word.
Sonia Barkallah, director
An EMI is a set of Intense perceptions and sensations experienced when close to death – or not – often described as visions of light, encounters with deceased beings or feelings of deep peace. A subject that divides as much as it fascinates because it touches on the mysteries of the consciousness of life and death.
“What interests me most is to understand why and how certain people, after their experiences, manage to describe with accuracy what happened in places where they were not physically present. In my opinion, this problem is one of the most important scientific issues of this century. Sonia Barkallah asks the question of : “What if what we thought was impossible was finally possible?”
For some scientists, NDEs are a kind of hallucinations due to artificial or natural chemical reactions in the brain. Others question the nature of consciousness and the possibility of a larger reality. To create her docufiction, Sonia Barkallah questioned and collected the arguments of several caregivers, the convinced but also the skeptical caregivers because the goal of the director is above all to advance research and help to “establish a scientific system that will make it possible to resolve the issue.”
At the time, there were no scientific studies. I really think that we must encourage research because at the medical, scientific and human level, we have a lot to gain from studying these phenomena.
Sonia Barkallah, director
This Saturday, November 23, “Witnesses” will be screened at the Mega Castillet in Perpignan from 7:30 p.m. in the presence of the director. More than 200 reservations have already been made. The docufiction will also be available for several screenings at the Clap Ciné in Canet-en-Roussillon from November 27.
Two film debates, still in the presence of Sonia Barkallah, are also planned for November 28 at 3 p.m. at Grau-du-Roi and at 8 p.m. at the CGR de Lattes.
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