In Flow of Words
2021 · 22m · Netherlands
Directed by Eliane Esther Bots
Genres: documentary, essay film, war
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Three interpreters for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia recount what it cost them to voice the testimonies of witnesses, victims, and perpetrators while never allowing their own emotions to be present.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to hear from the victims and perpetrators; Bots does something weirder—she makes the *absence* of the interpreters' inner lives the whole point, turning emotional restraint into a formal rebellion against witness testimony as inherent catharsis.
A rigorously composed essay film that situates itself in a lineage of reflexive documentary practice—think Farocki, think Harun Farocki's media-consciousness work—where the machinery of translation and institutional witnessing becomes the actual subject, not a frame around it.
The decision to let the interpreters' voices remain steady, professional, *untouched* while describing the horror they've absorbed is the hinge everything turns on—it's a single formal choice that does the moral work of the entire piece.