Between days between nights

How can one endure with anti-Gypsyism in a neighborhood cut off from the world ? Between 2007 and 2022, Stefka Stefanova Nikolova's life unfolds in a segregated and precarious daily existence.

Stefka Stefanova Nikolova, a resident of the Roma neighborhood of Nadezhda on the outskirts of Sliven in eastern Bulgaria, is the author of texts in which she expresses her feelings about the future of the world in which she and her fellow Roma find themselves. Cécile Canut first met her within these walls in 2007, forming a long-lasting friendship with her. It was in this neighborhood, cut off from the rest of the city, that the images resulting from a shared life experience were filmed, constituting an archive of the inhumanity of a precarious daily life, the result of devastating segregation and racism.


INTENSION/INTENTION…
Presented as a place of transition – from one world to another, from the recent past to the distant past, from day to night, or from one image to the next – the Nadezhda neighbourhood, as depicted in the film, is the place where Stefka S. Nikolova has lived all her life. It is also the neighbourhood where Cécile Canut has been meeting her regularly since 2007, and where the collective experience of filming took place, culminating in the co-direction of the film.
Through the twists and turns of a turbulent, full and intense life, for eighteen years the focus was on ‘camering’, as Fernand Deligny puts it, amongst the people of the neighbourhood. ‘Camérer’ is not quite the same as filming: it is an experience that seeks to escape the spectacle of a reality objectified by the artifice of representation. This experience is shared collectively, through the shared precariousness of everyday life, by integrating its necessities and conditions of existence into the filming process.
It therefore brings into play a common ground conducive to circumventing or subverting the cinematic apparatus: the aim of this workshop-form is to engage as closely as possible, in their very essence, with places, moments and bodies in motion, without, at any point, modelling one’s perceptions on those of others and thereby hindering the emergence of any event, however modest it may be.
The film, which is the culmination of this process – and thus, in a sense, its visible manifestation or imprint – unfolds over a long, very long period of time, during which many of the characters we see have died, some of them very recently. They therefore appear on screen, paradoxically, as spectres: they reveal themselves and, at the same time, fade away forever.
But beyond this obvious trajectory of the film’s characters, it is the neighbourhood as a whole that oscillates between the harshness of its social reality and its perpetual vulnerability to being erased: the place itself is in a state of constant transformation, torn between a commitment to the dignity of the older generation – their struggles and their dashed hopes – and the emergence of a youth that is constantly on the move, amidst political upheavals that act as so many fractures in the order of memory.
This past is that of Bulgaria’s abandoned buildings: old houses and blocks of flats, but also large disused factories, barracks overrun with brambles, gloomy administrative buildings crumbling into ruin – all of them near-ruins stubbornly bearing witness to a time as long gone as it is endlessly idealised, all vestiges of bygone eras that evoke mixed feelings. People of Stefka’s generation, as well as those even older, have been deeply affected by economic changes, and a melancholy pervades the air, spilling over from their words to be reflected in the expressions on the faces and in the postures of the elderly.
The film’s dual opening – the passage through the tunnel and the long cross-fade to a street scene – serves to highlight both the very tangible reality of the neighbourhood and the depth of existence that transcends it. What this stretching of the image seeks to highlight is the complexity of a time that is not merely linear: a layering of eras, an interweaving of routines and impossible stories, and the prolongation of a rather desperate wait; this time pushes the walls surrounding the ghettoised neighbourhood beyond their very limits.
The cross-fade, in its particular use—as a visual technique deliberately laid bare, thereby subverting its original artifice—has something to say about a neighbourhood populated by ostracised men and women, obscured in their ignored multitude, just as it has something to say about an editing process drawing on hundreds of hours of raw footage: it looks beyond the articulation of the image, delves into its very substance, and relates to the question of perspective. In short, the cross-fade in the film does not signify a transition from one shot to another, nor from one place to another, and indeed seeks to express more than a transition from one moment in time to another: it involves the juxtaposition of inseparable moments in time, one that creates a sense of disarray amongst people of Stefka S. Nikolova’s generation.
ore than just an optical illusion, it is a disrupted sense of space that implies a doubling of depths designed to disorient the viewer. Something that borders on the fantastical and is somewhat unsettling: a becoming of time itself, a counter-evolution that leaves one without any certainty in a space which, although precisely located, is nonetheless unpredictable. All of this prompts us to continually rethink the image and the concept of distancing, just as the relationship between memory or history and bodies must constantly be reconsidered. In truth, the cross-fade as intended in the film brings us back to this question: Are we inside or outside? Or rather: How can one be both inside and outside at the same time—that is to say, be here and elsewhere? Or better still: from here and from elsewhere? Gone and present?
Because it is drawn-out, prolonged and hazy, the film’s fade suggests a sequence of events designed to hint that another presence—between days and nights—is superimposed upon the neighbourhood’s tense daily life: something is there, yet cannot be seen. It is not a direct threat but a sense of uncertainty, a difference, a gap that breeds unease. In this fissure of space and time, a question arises concerning the relationship between people and things, and between things themselves: To what extent do people become part of their surroundings?
Because it is drawn-out, prolonged and hazy, the film’s fade suggests a sequence designed to hint that another presence—between days and nights—is superimposed upon the neighbourhood’s tense daily life: something is there, yet unseen. It is not a direct threat but a sense of uncertainty, a difference, a gap that breeds unease. In this fissure of space and time, a question arises concerning the relationship between people and things, and between things themselves: To what extent do people become part of their surroundings? To what extent do they fade into the background? And in what way do places – with all that they hold within them – intertwine and obscure our perspectives? Ultimately, this is an exploration of the relationship between lives, and the obscuring of these by the obstacles of a precarious everyday existence, where the world in the making is that of a poor neighbourhood, yet one stirred by the multitude of lives unfolding there; and which, despite the tragedies and disappearances, is like a space that is heady in its ability to regenerate itself through the redoubling of actions and discourses.