Filming to Profane the Border: Cinema as Counter-Power. A Conversation with Sylvain George

Abstract

This interview with French filmmaker Sylvain George examines two decades of cinematographic work dedicated to confronting the European migratory regime and its systematic violence. Through a dialogue that combines theoretical references with his practice as a filmmaker, George articulates his cinema as a form of counter-power that challenges dominant regimes of visibility, drawing on thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Jacques Rancière, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler. The conversation addresses the transformation of the European border apparatus since 2006—when George began filming—to the present, characterized by an intensification of violence, the externalization of control, and technological sophistication. George analyzes how the border regime operates as a perverse sacralization that produces bodies as “killable” and “illegitimate”, inscribing itself within a colonial continuity that structures contemporary migration policies. The filmmaker reflects on particularly powerful images from his filmography not as representations of suffering, but as political acts of forced dis-identification. Faced with criminalization and structural contempt, George proposes a cinema that profanes borders, that registers fragile forms of dwelling, and that sustains the gaze upon existences that power seeks to erase, thereby configuring a space to generate an inedit distribution of the sensible.