一切安好2022

　　A megalith rises from a sandy desert – or rather, a scale model of such a landscape. “I am the archive”, says a young female voice while ominous string music nails viewers to their seats. This opening sets the stage for the narrative and figurative language of Rithy Panh’(🎦)s dense mnemonic essay which uses stunning dioramas to tell a twenty-first century dystopian story. After a century of genocidal ideologies and destructive speciesism, animals have enslaved humans and taken over the world. In a wave of hope, the statues of the past have been removed but new ones are being erected to suppress the will of the people. This is now a planet of apes, boars and lions, and a zoological revolution is reversing and recreating the atrocities of the 20th century. As animal figures watch the film archives of our world, it feels as if Lumiè(🐉)re has been transported into a film by Méliès or Willis H. O’Brien. We are all well aware that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as a farce. The time has now come for this farce, in which “political language inhabits our dreams and consumes us”, to allow the possibility of a “graceful and tender insubordination” to emerge.