"I write with words dug up at night," says Édouard Glissant. Jean-Noël Cristiani takes him at his word as he shoots his film at home, on the ocean's edge, in the darkness of the tropical night, full of sound and presence. The dialogue, interspersed with readings and powerful poetic images of Glissant (the hold, the deep blue of the sea, the night, the magician of the herds), deals with "the historical wound", "the experience of the abyss" which, since the slave trade and slavery, has marked West Indian imagery. Glissant insists that it is impossible to know what happened before deportation, impossible to go back to the source of things. He sees in this a paradoxical, tragic, and unlimited splendour. The impotence of historical knowledge and the immense task that the poet takes on: to lend us a vision of "the before".

Arnaud Lambert
Filmmaker