“Whatever isn’t digitized will be lost.”

The place of memory. Remembering a story of cinema. Visual archeology. Imaginary voyages into the past. A fictional reconstruction cobbled together with fragments of an identity. All of these at once, Denys Desjardins’ The Zone is an experience of pure cinema, following Ariadne’s tangled thread through the ruins of the second half of the 20th century.

Composed of scratchy Super 8 films—including a vast collection belonging to a woman who left the entirety of her travel film footage to the filmmaker before losing her memory—the film builds a labyrinthine architecture alternating between individual and collective memories of the bygone century. Veritable love poem to Marker, this category-defying work unfolds like a cinematographic monument dedicated to the 7th art. Yet its greatest effect is felt when it dwells on the memory of this woman—this Madeleine who recalls in turn Desjardins’ mother, Hitchcock’s Madeleine, Proust’s madeleines, and the woman at the Orly quay in Marker’s La Jetée—a woman who loses her way in her own memories, slowly erasing the images of her life and of life itself. The central question of her fate is left echoing within each of us: what is left over once we begin to forget?

Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk's Artistic Director