"The White She-Camel"
From the Director
"And what if Ulysses, on his return from his time travel, had only found undecipherable scribbles, broken pieces, somber and shifting landscapes, memories scratched like splinters of his world and his life? His own room has become hardly recognizable to him, with his television still switched on, the cooker, the window and his wife sleeping. A disturbing disorder has established itself all around in which eyes and ears seem in a constant state of waiting, as if they are prisoners of these fragments of a reality so gripping, obtuse, impossible to avoid and yet lying, fleeing, opaque.
"The spectator of 'The White She-Camel' then might have a premonition about what it means to be 'a stranger in the world', like solitary weight, but also like the tension of discovery, like the desire to retrieve his past, like a longing to find a viable place.
"However, only few things will come to his rescue. A truck disappears in the landscape like a ship in the sea. A woman in a flowery dress bathes in a sea of blood. A child watches us with stunned eyes. The carcass of a torn, strange Soviet machine lies on the ground.
"Hereby, I have invented a new way of remembering, to turn back time by single jolts, by upheaval, by negative 'apparitions', declaiming time like a song that is said backwards. And there is something slightly monstrous in this film. It is a part common to all strong works that do not leave the spectator in peace. But what a reward it is when at regular intervals along that road moments of unimaginable grace suddenly appear. There are 'apparitions' in 'The White She-Camel' of the kind we rarely get a chance to see in cinema."