New BeginningsIsabelle Ingold and Vivianne Perelmuter: Two Films Jon Jost November 2025 Feature Articles Issue 115 Ailleurs, partout (Everywhere, anywhere), 2020, 1h 27m Director(s): Isabelle Ingold, Vivianne Perelmuter Les Recommencements (New Beginnings), 2025, 1h 27min Director(s): Isabelle Ingold, Vivianne Perelmuter The French/Belgian team of Isabelle Ingold and Vivianne Perelmuter has worked together since 1995, a creative partnership welded to their shared lives. Their recent films Ailleurs, Partout (2020) and Les Recommencements (2025) present a rich and interesting contrast – two vividly different films that, at the same time, show certain commonalities, which define them and their work. Left: Isabelle Ingold © LaScam Right: Vivianne Perelmuter @ Claire Lise Havet Ailleurs, partout is composed solely of surveillance videos from around the world; its protagonist, Shahin, is never seen. Les Recommencements is beautifully and subtly shot by Perelmuter, with its protagonist, Al Moon, perhaps on-screen half the film, often in close-up. Ailleurs, partout (Everywhere, anywhere) Ailleurs, partout commences with a near abstract image emerging out of a nighttime fog: a dense field of grey rectangular digital artifacts, tiny but neatly geometric. The camera pans across the horizon, a bright light moves across it and as the day opens, perhaps the hulk of a ship passes by. The camera pans to a peninsula, and stops, holding still, a fast zoom pulls back, we see land and sea; and then pans again, retracing itself; at one point a jagged zoom thrusts us forward to what appears to be a lighthouse, and then back. In the background the crackle of radio chatter is almost audible, and electronic drone-like music hums discreetly. A gentle voice speaks with minimal words, poetic in tone. Like a Marguerite Duras text, it seems to describe someone, unnamed, at the outset of a journey. He is 21. Ailleurs, partout The minimal, quiet tone is set. A young man’s voice is heard, reading the text of an interrogation – his, as he applies for refugee status, and asylum. He is Iranian. Another voice enters via a telephone, a woman. It is his mother, she says his name, “Shahin”; they converse. Perelmuter’s voice enters, shifting time, describing how they met, in Greece, and celebrated his 20th birthday on a beach. Crisp unserifed texts telegraph terse phrases, embedded in the image, readily readable. They appear to centre right, or later sometimes left, as chat texts being typed out. Ailleurs, partout Our eyes dart over the narratively neutral images, seeking meaning. The vision is familiar – surveillance imagery: the dull cold look, the gritty pixel-laden grain of crude cameras, casting night-time flares of light or going near all-white in full sun. The camera pans mechanically left/right; sometimes it zooms in, perhaps triggered by a motion sensor. In some passages the colour is crude and garish, looking over a shop or market, the brash commercial world of marketing, vapid signs to grab the attention. Looking, searching – surveillance visions, the kinds we see hovering overhead in a shop, or behind closed doors, watching, policing. Rectangular brackets indicate searching. There is something unnerving, the implication of imminent violence, or in other contexts, ennui and boredom. The cameras gaze, disinterestedly, looking for…. ? Ailleurs, partout This imagery is orchestrated with exquisite editing such that the random indifference of the material, and the aesthetic-technical differences are transformed into a visual symphony, using the qualities built in, as if a reverberation of 1960s–‘80s structuralist films (Michael Snow, Ernie Gehr, Peter Hutton, and others). Or in some passages, the prosaic ennui of dead-end labour – the cash register, cook, gas station – staring dully at almost nothing, hinting at Chantal Akerman, Raymond Depardon, Frederick Wiseman. Building with layered strands of voices – of Shahin, his mother, Perelmuter – and texts, and a rich subtext of music and sounds, the film weaves these together, shifting tones – more akin to music than drama. A kind of fugue, repeating in variations, forming a dense tapestry of suggestive moods, and the slim skeleton of an almost-story, elusive and furtive. From the outset, Perelmuter’s gentle voice sketches in a narrative for us: they’d met their character, Shahin, while scouting for a different film. He’d approached them in a refugee harbor in Greece, his young (he was 20) eyes bright, and attracting Ingold and Perelmuter, something vivid and alive in the dross of the place. Shahin, telling of his situation, where he is, what is happening in his life, his move to London and then the British mid-lands, the boredom of his exile life. Official asylum interrogation about Shahin’s past, where he lived, in form designed to elicit false testimony: what hospital, what places are near Isfahan, etc., read by Shahin. What is his religious stance, why he fears to return to Iran? He says because he has converted to Bahai’ism which is forbidden in Iran. For which one might be imprisoned or even executed. Shahin with mother, talking on telephone (video chat) – the mundane concerns, the son/mother caring and love. And likewise the sound track – from a number of differing composers, largely electronic, is astutely orchestrated, often a faint background, often with the barely audible crackle of police or other official voices as transmitted via radio signals, though the music occasionally is allowed to rise to the aural foreground and is used for editing punctuation, little exclamation points, ruptures or other gently dramatic tonal shifts. Ailleurs, partout Ailleurs, partout The following strands are delicately woven together, working in counter-point, gently pressing forward: Shahin arrives in the UK, is shunted to an unnamed midlands city with many Muslims; he is given just enough money to survive, but not allowed to work. He watches internet imagery on his computer and waits. The imaginary future he’d dreamed of evaporates in a numbing reality, pixel shadows of an unreal dream. Rather than a climax, the film moves to its denouement, the notice that his application for asylum has been accepted, but it lands flat. The promised land/life has evaporated in the vicissitudes real-life experience. Yes, Shahin has changed and been changed, but as with the dull looped repetitions of the surveillance cameras, life merely plods on. Ailleurs, partout Such poignant things underline the essential pathos which the film conveys – uprooted lives, a search for something “other” which cannot be defined, the grey mindscape of simple survival, dead-end jobs, and dead-end souls. There is no uplifting choral conclusion – rather a deeply embedded sense of a broad tragedy, written in human lives in all their pedestrian realities, hopes and dreams invisibly crashed in the cold bureaucratic and political cul-de-sacs of modern life. Shahin is not a romantic exile, but an everyman stranded on the shoals of history, his and ours. This film, gently, prompts us to think, to feel, and to empathetically share our commonality. Ailleurs, partout is pure cinematic poetry. New Beginnings (Les Recommencements) Opening shot: dark, nighttime. A prelude. A man’s face. Hands close, a fishing net; slowly the sound of water. A man’s voice, gentle and calm, describes the setting: fishermen waiting on the Klamath river for the salmon run to arrive, commenting that a good run was finally predicted, but then the fish never showed up. The imagery is 90% black, lights bobbing, boats vaguely hinted, nets, hands, faces. The overall tone is quiet, and pensive. The title, New Beginnings, and then location: the Yurok Indian Reservation in northern California. New Beginnings We’re introduced, indirectly to Al, camping, again nighttime, the image mostly black with a small fire being made. He comments about a green light, talking with the filmmakers, “Did you see it?” They respond, “no.” A hint of something possibly bad as he asks Isabelle to park the car in a place where, if needed, they can go quickly. Tracking in rez town, collapsed houses, Al’s voice comments how they, Indians, native Americans, rely too much on the white man, then questions why he says “they” about Indians, when he is one. This initiates a bit of philosophical self-inquiry which carries through the film. New Beginnings New Beginnings Stopped at a gas station, a woman, down and out, looking a probable meth-head, hits Al up for a cig, and they chat a bit. The rural Northern California atmosphere is quickly sketched in, natural beauty and social squalor, desperation. Men living rough in forest land, one talks about time when a man caught eight salmon a night and shared them; he’s drinking Coors Lite. Gutting fish, a voice over talks about salmon runs, why they’ve collapsed – dams, drought, a tiny parasite killing the fish. Close, intimate camera, visceral images of fish interior and flesh, examining for disease under microscope – a metaphor for Ingold and Perelmuter’s process? New Beginnings Camping night, minimalist imagery, sound. The filmmakers’ off-screen query, “Did you hear something?” and Al responds, “Looks like we got company.” An unspoken bond is revealed. A man, initially threatening, talks with Al, in the dark, seemingly drunk – brings up the American Legion, military service, and then, realising it is his friend, offers to sing and does so: a native chant. Al: Brief soliloquy in which he brings up being in Vietnam, and since has wanted nothing to do with guns, arms. Comment of 5th Amendment, that California is a bit more liberal about gun laws than in the mid-west. Al talks of being “in country” (Nam) and people wearing VC (Viet Cong) ears, questioning the mind-set of warriors. This is done over a slow nighttime walk in bushes, nearly abstract, heightening what is being said. Minimal newsreel images of Vietnam, helicopters, grunts, napalm while Al does a sparse VO (clearly done in post, in collaboration). Images of fishing, Al slowly pondering on the state of his world, and ours, in minimal words – haunting, quietly poetic. Perelmuter’s camera succinctly paints the atmosphere of the Yurok area of northern California, defining a place and its people, its mood and tone, deftly done, like Constable and Turner’s quick sketches. These weigh delicately with a mute pathos, like poetry. New Beginnings Nearly halfway into the film Ingold tells of meeting Al in a laundromat in Eureka, California, and how Al approached them, asking for them to translate a song, and then offered to take them to the Indian reservation where he lives, and that something clicked between he and the filmmakers. And they later found themselves, together, on the road, as he went to meet his Vietnam war buddies in Kansas City. Heading east they pass through western landscapes, empty, harsh; they stop to look at an animal’s burrow, and Al recalls VC tunnels, the haunting of the past. He talks of animals surviving in nature; and we see up close a road-kill deer, with a gaping red wound – the spectre of other deaths smothers the desolate scene as Al walks to their car. Nighttime slow tracking shot in ghost-like terrain, abandoned falling down houses, poor desert land, moonlit, haunting. Al talks of what is he doing going on this journey, of his youthful militance, hatred for whites, questioning…. Driving in desert, they stop at an abandoned house, its details cut open as if for an autopsy: decay, an old newspaper, family photos – the heavy weight of time and personal histories. A graffiti is scrawled across an abandoned mobile home: “Home is a place some people never find.” A suffocating cloud of pathos envelops us, and Al. New Beginnings Nighttime in a motel parking lot, a stranger talks about not being afraid of cops, and then of a man, Bob Good, who seemed maybe crazy, maybe the devil; then the speaker shifts introspectively and says that men, and he, are too full of ego, to know-it-all, and he feels that way and sees it is wrong. In a motel room, Trump on TV talking about demonic people and that people should have guns to protect themselves… Driving in desert, a handful of shots capturing the experience of the desolate west, and then nighttime, stopped for some deer crossing in headlights, a car hits and injures a young fawn that rises, limps off. Al talks with the driver, a young man in his late 20s perhaps, who, headed in same direction, lets the filmmakers draw him into the film, and in Tonopah, Nevada, and he and Al have a talk about the Vietnam war and what war can do to men. In desert setting, plane passes overhead and flashback for Al to Vietnam. A few newsreel shots from Nam. PTDS. New Beginnings New Beginnings Camping out, Isabelle intervenes, “if you don’t want to go see your friends it’s your choice” and Al responds that he in a way has to go because he’ll always wonder about those guys if he doesn’t and it will haunt him the rest of his life. Teen-aged girl, talking with Al in cafe – another along-the-way piece of reality. Al talks of having been an alcoholic, she of running away, a bad relationship, the desire to go back to an imaginary home which never was. Arriving in Kansas City, hints of the urban world at night. In the hotel where he is to meet up with his ‘Nam buddies, they embrace, ask men questions. In Al’s room, he undresses and puts on the “jungle” clothes he has for the formal rendezvous with his old friends. As he does so he turns to “the girls” and says there’s something he hasn’t told them, or anyone, and not even his ‘Nam pals. He makes a confession, and, open and vulnerable, softly weeps. He pulls himself together, still in tears, and tells himself he is a “good man.” He fixes his shoes and fresh clothes, choked up, still crying. And tells Ingold and Perelmuter that he told them his secret, because they have been important for him, and comments that “surprises have been important” in his life, and then exits. The film ends with a coda, about the life cycle of the salmon, with Al’s voice speaking in fragments, that they go to the ocean for their lives, and return, mystically, to the river and the very cranny they were born in, to spawn and die, and in a sense are then reborn. The imagery is of the salmon, in the river, under the surface, scarred and beaten by life, returning home. Ingold and Perelmuter shot the imagery. New Beginnings I have sketched out the “content” here, precisely because it does not “tell the story” – it describes a sequence of events, largely mundane, of some fragments of a man’s life, and some regional ecological and social realities. The man, Al, is not in any way charismatic, nor is his story particularly special for a person of his generation. Nor is the local reality peculiarly unique. What makes this film work is the pure cinematic wisdom in play, something which lifts the prosaic to the poetic. Here Ingold and Perelmuter show a remarkable maturity, a subtle mastery of their medium, in which they are capable of weaving the various strands in play – the place, the person, the voices, the images, the ambient sounds, the music, the “content” – to make a unified totality which is far more than the sum of its parts. It is that ineffable thing which elevates some things to “art,” and leaps above mere craft. In their hands this is done with great restraint, nothing that calls attention to itself, a skill which invisibly melds the various elements of this work into a singular unity, like the best of music. And like the best of music it can evince through seemingly invisible means, powerful emotional responses. At the end of this film, without any melodramatic strings being pulled, I found my eyes wet with tears, so discreetly had Ingold and Perelmuter orchestrated their materials and drawn a portrait of a man, of his world and ours, and touched me in a manner that evoked such a deep response. This is true artistry. New Beginnings poster In the usual sense of the word, these films are not “documentaries”, though on the surface they may appear to be. They are absolutely not fly-on-the-wall, “cinema verite” films. Rather they are orchestrated collaborations between the subjects, who were met by accident, and the filmmakers. While showing a “reality” as a documentary purports to do, these works are more poetic essays about a person, a place and world, in which in subtle ways the filmmakers probe, along with their subjects, what these things mean. In ways delicate and discreet, the filmmakers slip beneath the surface realities and prompt their subjects to delve deeper into who they are, and why. Having communicated with Ingold and Perelmuter regarding these films, I can confirm my intuition that this work is the result of a deep collaborative engagement between filmmakers and their subjects, a process in which they gave their skills as cinema-makers in the fullest sense – as technicians, as poets and artists, as fellow humans, with the capacity to open up their subjects to realms which likely they would not themselves be capable of doing. Ingold and Perelmuter gave to their now-friends a doorway through to articulate themselves in ways they most likely would not have been able to do alone. In these two films I think there is a particularly feminine aspect in that one cannot imagine a similar rapport between the “subjects” and the filmmakers were they men. There is an empathy, and in the case of the male subjects, a vulnerability, which would most likely not have occurred among men only. I say this as a man, with a life-long experience, also as an artist, in dealing with other men, who are most often psychically wounded, as males, in a way that disallows and virtually forbids certain emotional intimacies with other men. But – with some work of a real kind – things which a female can elicit from men which in most cases, a man could not, is what Ingold and Perelmuter have managed. In both of these films I felt this aura present, a feminine “something” which left an opening for the men involved to be more personally revealing and intimate in psychological terms, than would be likely were the filmmakers male. This merely adds great human depth to the cinematic sorcery. New Beginnings Unconsciously linking these two films are lines of dialogue that encapsulate the generosity of the filmmakers, a generosity extended to their subjects, Shahin and Al, and to their audience. Near the end of New Beginnings, when Al is seen dressing himself before going to see his Nam buddies, he says of himself, having made his confession to Ingold and Perelmuter: “Cause I’m a good man. I’m going downstairs to be with good men. Shut up, Al.” In Ailleurs, partout, Shahin is talking to his mother on the telephone, who tells him, “We’re right to cry. We’d give anything to have our children safe and good. To have good children, it’s having a good life. So I’ve been successful so far. Let’s see what comes next.” And Shahin replies: “You’re a good person, that’s why I’m good, you know?” And she responds: “No, you’re a good boy. You have a good heart. You’re not a bad person.” In ways discreet and subtle, and purely cinematic – its own language – these films exude a compassion, an embrace of the world and its inhabitants which works in a way akin to music, which cannot be conveyed in any way other than what it is, cinema which touches the soul without explanation. Endnotes
