Sud (Documentary)
Director: Chantal Akerman
Producer: Marilyn Watelet,Xavier Carniaux
Cinematographer: Robert Fenz,Raymond Fromont,Chantal Akerman
Editor: Claire Atherton
A searing study of the effect a shocking hate crime has on the people and landscape of a Texan town.
Inspired by the writings of William Faulkner and James Baldwin, Chantal Akerman originally intended to make a film meditating on the American South at large. But when she read about the murder of a local Black man named James Byrd Jr – a husband and father who was brutally assaulted by three white men before they dragged his body behind a truck for three miles – in Jasper, Texas, she shifted her focus to the town. Rather than examine the crime from a forensic perspective, Akerman probes the knotty soul of this American community: interviewing family members and local law enforcement; attending Byrd’s memorial; and, in one idiosyncratic section, filming a long tracking shot along the road on which Byrd was killed.
Akerman made numerous films in the United States, but Sud stands in stark contrast to her more personal, New York–set works Hotel Monterey, La chambre and News From Home. Though the spectre of the Holocaust haunts this film – as it does much of her work – Sud is a deeply felt documentary about community and the psychogeography of a landscape mired in racism, as seen through the eyes of an outsider.
“Part lamentation, part reportage, an ‘evocation’ rather than an investigation, as with every Akerman work, South is arguably as much concerned with the relationship between narrative, space and time as with a specific subject.” – Senses of Cinema
2K Digitisation.