De Facto

A man sits at a table in front of open brickwork, behind which is a forest. A relentlessly advancing barrage of words fills the empty room, which initially lacks any context. In a breathlessly rapid monologue, the man testifies to atrocities, gives an account of camp work, humiliation, degradation, torture, violence and rape, of broken people, lives without dignity, of survival and death. In the second scene a different man appears, and he too embodies a perpetrator. Over three acts, the two actors, in continuous uninterrupted shots, relate the reports of witnesses and perpetrators from situations of conflict, war and violence, without any historical, geographical or social contexts being named. What is spoken is based on statements made by perpetrators and survivors, and the court rulings and transcripts relating to various events in contemporary history. Detached from individuals and systems, as well as from compassion, admissions of guilt, defence or justification, the standpoints, roles and perspectives embodied by the actors merge into perpetrator archetypes, bringing out, in a concentrated accumulation of facts, the essence and extreme nature of the deeds and their perpetration: the discarding of reason, the free disinhibition of aggression, the escalation of brutality, the unleashing of violence and the way it takes on a momentum of their own. Within a minimalist setting and with an all-encompassing force of words, Selma Doborac translates the philosophical examination of perpetration into a cinematic-literary composition which is meticulously thought out, down to the smallest detail, and which remains as persistent in its duration, consistency and intransigence as a judge during a hearing. On the levels of content, form and language, De Facto performs processes, strategies and methods of dehumanisation: in masterful performances by Christoph Bach and Cornelius Obonya, the facts are recited just as mechanically as the acts described were carried out: without emotion and trimmed to time and efficiency. The cinematic translation of the role of language and the dramaturgical staging of posture, body, gestures and gaze result in a new form of documenting, archiving and transmitting testimony, which requires no images to be understood. Selma Doborac’s De Facto is a masterpiece about reason, morality, (in)human abysses and the essence of violence. (Martina Genetti, Diagonale - translation into English by Peter Waugh)