Pacifiction
2022, Albert Serra, France/Spain/Germany/Portugal
Deliberately paced but thematically expansive, Pacifiction may prove challenging for viewers who found 2024’s screening of India Song “a bit slow.” However, given the strength of the filmmaking on display and the focus on the perennially relevant topic of French colonialism in the Pacific, we think it will be rewarding for viewers who give it the time.
Ostensibly a spy thriller, Albert Serra’s film stars Benoît Magimel as a representative of the French government in Tahiti (still a collectivity of France). Part of his role involves the management of locals’ expectations, especially as rumours begin to spread of the return of nuclear testing.
The spectre of nuclear weapons in Te Moana-nui-a-kiwa may recall New Zealand’s own history given the opposition to French testing throughout the 20th Century, from protests at Moruroa Atoll to the destruction of the Rainbow Warrior. Although France eventually signed and ratified the Treaty of Rarotonga in 1996, formalising a nuclear-free Pacific, its presence as a colonial power has endured. In May 2024, violence broke out in Kanaky, another French Pacific collectivity in response to an attempt to dilute Indigenous voting rights.
Serra may take a relaxed approach to tone pacing but it is clear that he knows the threat lurking below the calm surface hasn’t gone anywhere.“With an ethereal score, defiantly murky plot, hallucinatory cinematography, and some of humanity’s greatest horrors hanging over it like a pall, Pacifiction feels like a fever dream in the truest sense.”—Farah Cheded, A Good Movie To Watch
