The Rate’s Cut

In 1991, Rate, a man from the municipality of Orihuela, buys a camera for the first time, and starts recording his loved ones …

Borrowing from the “found footage” its dirty image, its chaotic frame and its brutal cuts, The Rate’s Cut appears as the reconstitution of a tragic event, which dramatization wanted to be, in the first place, the expression of filial love. These amateur images, transformed into a horror movie, are evoking the necessary violence of the documentary filmmaking, inscripting it at the heart of their archaic form, the family film. It tells us that the use of the camera irremediably establishes between the director and the subject a relationship of dominance -that the ethical term of the “good distance” barely conceals- which is never interrupted. Creating a “film de genre” by the means of real archives (where the genre, usually, creates them), the director gives us a ridiculous manifesto, that leads the documentary to assume, rather than repress, the constituent violent of its gesture, by exposing it in the film.