SYNOPSIS
Starting from her cousin’s memory, Dominique Cabrera traces a visual echo between a family photogr Asian Premiereh and a shot from Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962). Blending archival images, family albums, and production notes, the film connects Orly Airport to the 1962 Algerian exodus, revealing intersections of personal memory and postcolonial history. Through interviews and re-enactments, it explores memory, chance, and authorshInternational, while Cabrera's voice-over follows traces of exile and identity, showing how a single image becomes a portal to layered histories and sensory affinities.
*The September 16 screening will be presented as a joint screening: Special Invitation Screening La Jetée - View Film Information
REVIEW
Chris Marker’s 1962 film
La Jetée is a landmark of cinematic history, celebrated for its profound sci-fi meditation on time and its radical use of still photographs to redefine the language of film. In Dominique Cabrera’s new work,
La Jetée, the Fifth Shot, this masterpiece becomes the subject of a fascinating and intimate act of cinematic archaeology. The investigation begins with a startling claim from Cabrera’s cousin, Jean Henri: that a family seen from behind in the film’s fifth shot is, in fact, himself as a boy, with his parents at Orly Airport. Could the boy with the prominent ears in that photograph truly be Henri? And if so, what was his family doing there?
Echoing La Jetée's own openingㅡ"This is the story of a man marked by an image from his childhood"ㅡCabrera revisits the photograph again and again. She seeks answers from relatives and Marker's former collaborators. The quest mirrors the original film’s motifs of time travel, the obsessive power of images, and the origins of memory, ultimately transcending a personal inquiry to become a cinematic gesture in its own right. As her investigation unfolds, the history of 1962 comes into focus: the end of the Algerian War and the mass exodus of French settlers (pieds-noirs) who had been rooted in Algeria. In this light, La Jetée is reimagined not only as a work of science fiction, but as a historical and familial document of independence and the end of colonial rule.
During the 17th DMZ Docs, Marker’s La Jetée will be screened alongside Cabrera’s work—a rare opportunity to witness a dialogue unfold across film history.
