The image of people who are trying to cool off in a city park is being distorted widthways and lengthways, like a soap bubble. Swelling music makes the tension rise, until the image unravels itself into colourful barcodes and races across the screen to the sound of a compelling beat. We hear the sound of a telephone trying to make contact with another extension, while from high in the air the camera sweeps past motorways and high buildings, to end up in a different spot, perhaps even in another city or another country. In this way, d'Haeseleer symbolizes the dynamics of the transfer of information in this era of glass-fibre cables, computers and modems.
We see a man and a woman separated by a bead curtain. Then follows a restless and diffuse sequence of image… and sounds. It is a random selection, in the way that things can happen to catch your eye while your mind is somewhere else entirely; streets, houses, billboards, the rear lights of a car driving in front of you. But from time to time a concrete image also appears: of how the woman was talking, while sitting on a chair, how the car was being parked in the garage, how the sun was shining in a corner of the garden. All on his own, the man is walking meditatively through the green space in a business park. The woman is lying on a bed, staring at the wall. They are alone, they are silent, they are remembering. They are forged together by the images, but are not actually together.
Vinken and Van Kampen

File explores the bandwidth between representation and immersion and shows a complex world. The tape is video clip, essay, action film, sociological study, documentary, soap, commercial but also a hermetic lump of sensations. A dated relationship goes off the rails and two people lose each other in a world of overdrive (Catalogue 30th International film Festival Rotterdam 2001) Read more...