Giv­en that every fic­tion film has its doc­u­men­tary side, every doc­u­men­tary film its fic­tion side, what is need­ed, in order to get the debate out of the con­fu­sion this caus­es, is to exam­ine the mul­ti­ple modal­i­ties of this exchange.

Rob Rom­bout’s cin­e­ma, which does not ful­ly fit into either cat­e­go­ry, but rather falls with­in the very broad inter­va l that sep­a­rates them, lends itself par­tic­u­lar­ly well to this exam­i­na­tion. For this film­mak­er, who lives in Brus­sels but has been trav­el­ling and work­ing in all con­ti­nents for thir­ty years, mak­ing a film is nei­ther about build­ing a uni­verse born of his imag­i­na­tion nor about cap­tur­ing some real­i­ty behind which he would dis­ap­pear, but in fact about gath­er­ing scat­tered frag­ments of real­i­ty like a fish­er­man bring­ing back fish of every species in his net, and arrang­ing them as he wish­es on his film’s stall.

Each of Rob Rom­bout’s films is a jour­ney over a dis­tance that can be long (some­times to thean­tipodes), dur­ing which the film­mak­er mul­ti­plies encoun­ters with peo­ple who tell their sto­ries. Some proud­ly express the hap­pi­ness of hav­ing lived the life they want­ed, while oth­ers tes­ti­fy to the dif­fi­cul­ties encoun­tered in try­ing to escape the con­straints of exis­tence, be they mate­r­i­al, social, racial, emo­tion­al or cul­tur­al. All have come to accept their fate. These micro sto­ries of life that ques­tion the recur­ring theme of des­tiny and free­dom are part of a sys­tem estab­lished a pri­ori by the film­mak­er to estab­lish links between all these frag­ments. There is The film “clothes­line” which stretch­es a thread between two poles and attach­es to it the diverse sto­ries of a few trav­el­ers; the film “lace” which inter­twines its stitch­es between sev­er­al char­ac­ters who do not know each oth­er; the film “star” whose each branch is asso­ci­at­ed with a cen­tral point to which the film returns at reg­u­lar inter­vals; the film “con­stel­la­tion” which, over a ter­ri­to­ry, some­times as vast as a con­ti­nent, draws an imag­i­nary fig­ure between arbi­trar­i­ly cho­sen places, which have no oth­er rela­tion­ship to each oth­er than the fact that they are called “Ams­ter­dam”.