In the Intense Now

“In the Intense Now” is a feature documentary that focuses on certain events of the 1960s. Narrated in first person, the film reflects on that which is revealed by four sets of images: footage of the French students’ uprising in May of 1968; the images captured by amateurs during the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August of the same year, when forces led by the Soviet Union put an end to the Prague Spring; shots of the funerals of students, workers, and police officers killed during the events of 1968 in the cities of Paris, Lyon, Prague, and Rio de Janeiro; and the scenes that a tourist – the director’s mother – filmed in China in 1966, the year of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

This means that “In the Intense Now” may be seen as a film about the nature of images of history. Who films them, why, and how? Is there a difference between records created under different political systems? What can the archive reveal of itself without the viewer having to consult its historical context? What sorts of images are born out of fear, out of rapture, out of urgency, out of joy? These are questions that the documentary poses to itself, in the belief that images contain truths inherent to themselves.