Synopsis
Jaweb is 19 years old and dreams of becoming a matador. On the fringe of the Camargue bullfighting scene, the young man trains alone. Every evening on a wasteland, he repeats the same gestures. With his red cape, he joins an imaginary bull that he accompanies tirelessly towards an ideal end. But to make a name for himself, Jaweb must confront death. From the young man’s fantasies of glory to the raw reality of a timeless practice, Jaweb’s journey takes us on a journey of reflection around bullfighting, the last place where people come to look death in the face.
A word from Tënk
By staging Jaweb in his journey to becoming a matador, director Pascal Catheland mirrors the theatricality of the controversial practice explored by Neither Sun nor Death. Before we even see the bull, and the violence that accompanies it, we see the posture of the body in its choreographic purity. Jaweb is a young man bending to years of ancestral ritual, as if driven by an energy from a bygone era. Bullfighting is also part of social status: la corrida is peopled with legendary figures and Jaweb wants nothing more than to be one of them. But getting to the spotlight in the centre of the ring means exploring darkness: approaching cruelty, and even death. Moving from underexposure to overexposure, Neither Sun nor Death embraces the paradoxes of a humanity that dares to provoke what it fears the most, all the better to ward it off.
Olivia Cooper Hadjian
Member of the Cinéma du Réel Selection Committee,
Critic for Les Cahiers du Cinéma
