Synopsis
This is the story of a universal and familiar tool: barbed wire. It goes back to the first settlers, to the spirit of conquest, and is anchored in the space-time of the American West. It’s the story of a small agricultural tool that turns into a political story and gets carried away by the train of capitalism. It’s the story of the evolution of surveillance and control techniques; the inversion of a relationship between man and animal. It is the story of the world of enclosure and the enclosure of the world.
A word from Tënk
Imitating the tangled form of barbed wire, Sophie Bruneau weaves together the various wounds inflicted on American land: its occupation by cattle-breeding settlers, its conversion into private property, its division - into parcels, states, countries - and its crisscrossing by railroad lines, multiplying the ancestral rhythm of human movement. Little by little, the film composes an immense drawing, made up of the straight lines that the camera likes to follow and the sinuous movements of life that attempt to exist between them.
Olivia Cooper Hadjian
Member of the Cinéma du Réel Selection Committee,
Critic for Les Cahiers du Cinéma
