Synopsis
Beneath the Rock (Sous la roche), a poetic film by Xavier Christiaens, explores the silences and wounds that pass through generations, and the ways in which family legacies continue to haunt the present. Through the final years of his mother’s life, marked by hallucinations and profound psychological distress, the filmmaker confronts an intimate enigma whose traces he seeks in the story of his grandfather Georges, an agricultural engineer who worked in the Belgian Congo, Mozambique and Turkey. The rediscovery of two photographic albums reveals a world shaped by travel, cotton production and industrial modernisation, but also marked by colonial relations of domination, patriarchal violence and the invisibility of women.
At the crossroads of autofiction, filmed diary and poetic cinema, the film unfolds in fragments, weaving together archival photographs, notebooks, familiar objects and voice-over, without ever allowing them to fully converge. The filmmaker’s body becomes that of Dadia, a character who is both familiar and estranged, whose everyday gestures sketch out a hollowed-out self-portrait. Through editing, shadows, landscapes and an intricate soundscape, different eras and places enter into dialogue, blurring the boundaries between waking and dreaming, reality and imagination.
Yet Beneath the Rock is not merely an exploration of buried memories. The sounds of the village, the animals, the landscapes and the presence of a cat gradually open up a path towards the living world, encounters and movement. Slowly emerging from his burrow, Dadia begins to venture out towards others and the world.
A posthumous tribute to his mother, the film becomes an existential journey in which the imaginative power of cinema allows us to approach what memory cannot resolve, without dispelling the mystery or forcing silence to speak.
Technical data
- Director
- Xavier Christiaens
- Script
- Xavier Christiaens
- Photography
- Xavier Christiaens
- Editing
- Xavier Christiaens with Agnès Bruckert
- Music & sound
- Xavier Christiaens
- Voice over
- Akina Christiaens
- Film completion
- Akina Christiaens & Sandrine Blaise
- Finishing
- To be determined
- Production
- Ostrov (Belgium), Sandrine Blaise
- Coproduction
- CBA (Belgium), Javier Packer Comyn
With heartfelt thanks to Chantal Steinberg, Agnès Bruckert, Javier Packer Comyn, Damien Cattinari, Matthieu Canaguier, Rudi Maerten, Laurent Van Lancker, Jo Van Hove, Martin Ryelandt, Sébastien Ronceray, Olivier Smolders, Benoit et Pascal Christiaens, Benoit Servais, Katia Rossini, Claudio Pazienza, Sophie Bruneau, cinéma nova, Sophie Schoukens, Peter Woditsch, Benoît Dervaux, Anouck Everaere, Anju Raïs, Julien Contreau, Françoise Bailleux, Lucas, André Jasinski…