Summaries

Synopsis

The Remnants is a journey into the contradictions of today's wars, in which the remains of the conflict always outlive the conflict itself. It is a journey into the culture and spirituality of a people that manages to incorporate good and evil, construction and destruction, and to convert killing objects into handy tools to tackle everyday life.Between 1964 and 1973, during the Vietnam war, the American air force carried out over 500.000 bombing missions over Laos, dropping more than 2 million tons of explosives over the country.Forty years later, everything has changed in Laos, but people's lives are still deeply affected by the omnipresence of war remnants, scattered in cultivated fields, forests, villages and even cities.The film tells about daily life in the most heavily bombed areas of Laos, the Xieng Khuang and Savannakhet regions: here, the population is mainly gathered in traditional and agricultural villages and lives in very close contact with the natural environment, sustaining itself thanks to local resources. However, alien and unforeseen elements have invaded the natural environment: war remnants, scattered everywhere, bombs and projectiles of all sizes, represent a deadly risk for the population, but they are also a source of precious material, to be used in everyday life or to be sold in the city.The film intertwines different stories and characters who tell us the recent history of the country through the lens of their own lives. The scenery is that of open-air museum of war, created by the hands of the rural communities in all the villages which, after having been knocked down by the bombs, have used the same bombs as a material for reconstruction.Laos is changing at a fast pace, its population is among the youngest in the world, and although the memory of the conflict is fading away, everything here still speaks about war.A war that keeps re-emerging : you can feel it in the demining units that comb the country (only 5% of the unexploited ordnance have been neutralized in the past 30 years of activity), in the puppet shows set up in rural schools to inform on the dangers of UXOs (Unexploded Ordnance), in the guided tours of war-struck areas, in the evocative names of some places, such as the restaurant called Craters, which stylishly display different shaped rocket nose cones.The rural lifestyle and its harmony with the territory is violated by those alien and lethal objects scattered in the fields. Life and the normality of everyday gestures violently clash with an environment that blatantly exhibits the memory of the conflict. The image is surreal but extremely concrete at the same time.