Short of the Week

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Documentary Fabio Palmieri

Irregulars

Against a tellingly hypnotic factory backdrop, a refugee encapsulates the global immigration crisis in his own wrenching words.

Play
Documentary Fabio Palmieri

Irregulars

Against a tellingly hypnotic factory backdrop, a refugee encapsulates the global immigration crisis in his own wrenching words.

Irregulars

Directed By Fabio Palmieri
Produced By NotWorkingFilms
Made In Italy

News and social media are spinning so fast, it feels like we’re in perpetual crisis. We hop frantically from the fear of an emboldened white supremacy movement, to the horror of a potential nuclear conflict, to uncomfortably grappling with systemic sexual misconduct from some of our most prominent and revered men—and still the cycle spins on. It’s honestly dizzying. Nothing can command sustained engagement anymore it seems, and so perhaps it was naive to believe that the plight of desperate outsiders fleeing their home countries ever stood a chance. Still, even as the Western public conscience has moved on, refugees cannot, and Italian filmmaker Fabio Palmieri’s release of his celebrated short Irregulars, is a chance to re-engage with this on-going catastrophe. The story of Cyrille, told in his own voice, this unique short pairs powerful personal testimony with a fascinating visual framing, breaking through the media noise via the strength of this metaphorical juxtaposition.

Never has storytelling been so democratized, that an individual’s story from a faraway place can be so easily disseminated to thousands—millions—across the globe so quickly. Yet in spite of this, perhaps largely because of this, capturing this kind of attention is immeasurably hard to  achieve. With so much media vying for your empathy, for your outrage, tuning out is easy. I tried to explain this dynamic last year when I wrote about vital short filmmaking on the Syrian Refugee Crisis, and one year later, the challenges seem greater—fatigue and ennui have driven the refugee crisis even further into the background. 

The central point of that piece was that these films are rich in human drama, and should not be seen as “eating your vegetables”. They are riveting stories of human hopes and fears, full of twists and challenges, and not only capable of instilling sadness, but also inspiration. They are also not at all homogenous. As we sometimes forget, refugees are themselves diverse, and the styles that filmmakers have brought to their narratives run the gamut of tone and approaches. Palmieri’s film proves one of the most apt examples of this, as he confronts a basic filmmaking challenge—the lack of video of Cyrille— and bends it to his advantage.

But what could I show instead of a blank black screen? 

Palmieri met Cyrille in a park in Milan and his story was so touching that he felt the need and the urgency to document it. Since Cyrille was afraid that his family would see how sad and desperate he was, he didn’t want to appear in the film, so Palmieri just recorded his voice. The question subsequently arose in Palmieri’s mind: “But what could I show instead of a blank black screen?”

The answer proved simple, but profound. Palmieri substituted the missing footage of his subject with images from a mannequin factory, a poignant visual metaphor for dehumanization. We witness seas of identical all-too-human faces lining the wall, and crowds of bodies in varying states of completion littering the factory floors, standing in for the waves of immigrants. It is not only dehumanization, but de-personalization that Palmieri is invoking, and the two go hand in hand—the obliteration of identifying differentiation is the kind of violence we do linguistically when we use blanket terms like “refugee”. 

The metaphor is striking, but it is fair to question whether it is too on-the-nose to sustain a 9min film. It has surprising depth however when paired with Cyrille’s narration—commenting further upon racial dimensions, and concepts such as parenthood and disposability. The means of production itself become a distinct metaphor when Cyrille relates the exploitation he experiences when he lands a low-skill job in an Italian factory. Through it all Palmieri extends the power of the visuals by cleverly weaving his images into the narration to create connections. When Cyrille speaks of escaping the hospital in which he is treated upon arrival in Italy, we see mannequins that are boxed up to leave for shipping. This congruous pairing of images and voice helps sustain audience attention by making the images not only intellectually stimulating, but by  connecting them to the narrative itself. 

And goodness, the narrative is gripping. The film is a version of a profile doc, and the biggest challenge to the success of a profile doc is one that is largely out of a filmmaker’s control. How charismatic is your subject? Can they tell a story? So many short docs have interesting premises, and are produced with flair, yet are ultimately sunk by this hurdle. Cyrille is bright, and clear spoken however. There is a heartbreakingly tremulous nature to his narration, and his English is oddly reminiscent of Werner Herzog’s famous voice. His story is dramatic too, with impeccable rhythms, and startling turns. Like in a film we featured last week, Backstory, it can be a challenge to build empathy absent the expressivity of the human face, and with a different subject Irregulars could have been turned out to be a coldly formal work. But, Cyrille’s storytelling is massively compelling in its own right, and superlative compared to other films of this topic. 

Irregulars met success on festival scene, winning prizes at top-tier destinations like Aspen, Hamptons, and Aesthetica, over the past year and a half. Yet I believe success of this online release will be the more important validation. Palmieri wrote to us saying  “I believe that movies, even documentaries, are form of art, they have different and higher purposes than simply to inform you on something. If you need to be updated you already have TV, newspapers and the internet. I firmly believe in the power of art and that it must go beyond reality.” Can Irregulars break through in this very different type of environment? Will Cyrille’s story buck the complacency we have arrived at when it comes to immigrant stories? We hope so.