Here We Are Waiting for You

This seventy three minute documentary brings together countless images from the twentieth century. Wars, workers, inventions, daily life, death and birth all run in the same flow. There is no narrator; short pieces of text appear on screen instead, and Wim Mertens's music ties the images together. Marcelo Masagão's Brazilian film uses archive footage not to tell history but to give the feel of a century. Famous people and people nobody has heard of stand side by side and no distinction is made between them. The editing works like poetry: the connections are not explained, they are left to the viewer. What comes out is less a documentary than a lament.