This tragicomic fictive documentary tells the story of Villereau, a small village in northern France. When alarm is raised about a terrorist threat in this villige, young filmmaker Morgane Dziurla-Petit returns to her home town to investigate. Soon, she finds out that there is a big misunderstanding: there is no terrorist threat at all. And so, the roaming fake news story becomes a metaphor for something different: the absurdity of xenophobia, the media-driven paranoia and the rejection by the conservative villagers of anything outside the norm.

But besides the critical bird’s-eye view that the director takes, EXCESS WILL SAVE US is also a story about family relationships, about both the closeness and anguish. It is precisely through the transparent use of fictional elements within the documentary genre that the filmmaker manages to get closer to reality. This hybrid form of fiction-reality also reflects the position in which the filmmaker stands: intimately familiar but a spectator at the same time. Because unlike her father and niece, she díd manage to get away from the village.

EXCESS WILL SAVE US is a quirky, one-of-a-kind, docu-fiction film and rightly won the Special Jury Award at the 2022 edition of IFFR. In short, come and see!

– Hilde

IMDb

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