With "A Country in Flames," Mona Convert is full of joy

The best thing is always to enter the dark and know nothing, ideally. Darkness is first and foremost, before the amniotic comfort of the movie theater, the willful ignorance of what we are about to see. "I don't want to know anything," the spectator's wisdom, the first critical commandment. A film about spectacle, but a fundamentally realistic work, A Country in Flames is the kind of documentary best discovered blind.

If we continue reading, its principle consists of the recording of the ritual of a fireworks display, an annual votive ceremony in a forest in the Landes, which brings us back as much to the bewitchments of childhood as to the origins of cinema, to the primitive and fairground art, and an approach to experimental cinema. The first feature film by Mona Convert, a filmmaker with a fine arts background, it is a magnificent work in black, anthropological and witchy, whose darkness makes the progressive blaze possible, desirable. The flame film – even if in digital format – makes its way to the scale of nature revealed among the primordial shadows, dense smoke and luminous showers, sparks on the scale of a tree trunk and the world. We take risks playing with fire, it is better to know one's craft.

The film proceeds in stages, from the crackling in the trees to the final bouquet, in widening concentric circles. Barely more than an hour passes to have a fleeting, night-vision view of the place where we are: "l