DE FACTO
Austria, Germany, 2023
130 min.
- Synopsis
- Curatorial presentation
How can cinema engage with complicity in crimes against humanity and extreme violence without conniving in it? De Facto finds answers to these questions in a meticulously directed play of two actors, a precisely compiled film script and a deliberately reduced setting.
The question regarding the representation of historical atrocity, which was popularised by auteurs such as Resnais, Marker and Lanzmann, is one that cinema has been grappling with for the better part of the last century. And the myriad answers keep on flowing, just like History itself, posing the question again and again, with every unjust death, every mass murder, every war, and every genocide that cinema will have to grapple with representing — but how? De Facto offers one possible answer, by finding within a rigorous and very precise form a means to represent the perpetrators of the systematic crimes committed in modern times, probing their Weltanschauung without replicating its violence onto the spectator. The aesthetic and the political are far from being poles of a binomial formula, on the contrary — they are one and the same energy, committed to a challenging tour de force. (Flavia Dima)
