Sur la plage de Belfast

The perennial beauty of Sur la plage de Belfast stems from its status as a ‘work in progress’, unfolding in a way that neither the viewer nor the director, at the time of filming, can predict. A film inquiry, a film with a quest, its fascination comes from the dual, paradoxical status given to the amateur images found by chance by Henri-François Imbert in a Super 8 camera that he was given: insignificant and forgotten by those who feature on the film and who barely recall being filmed, they are the irrational mystery that the filmmaker wishes to resolve and that sparks both his journey and the film that we are watching. Once developed, once exposed, and once shown to its long-lost protagonists, the images convey the memories of carefree years of the past. And above all, they revive the memory – and even the presence – of the person who filmed them, now dead: from one filmmaker to the other, from Belfast to Paris, a return trip, a transmission, an affair of the gaze, and the genesis of some beautiful encounters and a very beautiful film.