Omer Fast – Continuity, 2012

Omer Fast’s video work is steeped in social, political, geopolitical and historical issues; it questions the statuses of image and word by superimposing different registers — reality and fiction, original and copy, document and artifice. Taking as its starting point questions relating to language, translation and identity, his work, which involves both film and visual expression, examines the construction of narratives and how they alter as they get passed on and mediatised.

Described as a work about bereavement, Continuity depicts the return to his family of a young soldier who had fought in Afghanistan. The script becomes increasingly strange as it is infiltrated by surreal apparitions and re-enacted by three different actors in the role of the son. Although at first glance it looks like a typical family reunion scene, the film compulsively repeats the same ritual, imagined by the parents as they try to come to terms with the loss of their child. Omer Fast’s video is a reflection on film continuity — which consists in producing a sensation of linear time from disparate shots. In an echo of the emotional dislocation that the characters are going through, it plays on the impossibility of discriminating between reality and the implausible and on the rejection of coherence.