Centre International de Création Vidéo Montbéliard Belfort

A torrent of words, of tenderness, of violence, of sense, and nonsense. Exasperation in speech as it butts up against things and repeats in a million ways its submission to nature and life. Red night. Collapse of night as dreams topple to their own destruction. Ruin, as an inescapable as the impediments we place before ourselves, destiny which sweeps us away, and on which we have so little hold.

From "That was..." to "...Did we go there?" The Antarctic approached, observed, scrutinised, analysed, displaced. Questions about reading the landscape, reading motion; A slow motion journey through memory, as if "to have the time at last to know."

Canton is said to be the most Chinese of cities: eight million people, a city running wild, where the past disappears under concrete and tarmac. Rob Rombout and the video artist Robert Cahen follow five people caught between two cultures, two systems, two ideas of art. A window, a photograph, a painting or a foreign language always stands between them and the city. The film asks what it means to be in China and, at the same time, not to be there.

In 1896 Georges Nagelmackers launched the Nord Express from Paris to St Petersburg. In 1990 the film rides the 47 hours from Paris to Moscow, in a time of upheaval: in Paris railwaymen lay the new TGV lines, in Berlin the Wall is crumbling, and at Brest, on the Soviet border, the carriages are moved onto broad-gauge bogies. Galina, the sleeping-car attendant, makes tea. In the corridor Theodore, a student, looks out over the curtain. In West Berlin the painter Ben Wagin doubts we will ever go any faster.