Afghanistan-Switzerland / 2023 / 95 min / English & French with English subtitles / Documentary
Three young reporters get into a car for a journey that will change their lives forever.
- Serge, a moralist and workaholic journalist,
- Paolo, a photographer as jovial as unconscious,
- and Claude, a coward Swiss typographer who improvises himself as a filmmaker.
In the year following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, young journalist Claude Baechtold finds himself in the war zone of Afghanistan. Not entirely voluntarily, the self-confessed anti-militarist from French-speaking Switzerland is dragged on a tour of the entire country by two fearless reporters. Equipped with a video camera he bought at a bazaar in Kabul, he follows them for two months on a daring journey. With impressive archive footage that was until recently thought lost, Baechtold captures in his humorous road movie doc how he inadvertently becomes a war reporter and is able thereby to deal with his own personal strokes of fate.
RIVERBOOM is amazing because of three main reasons: 1) It is a suspenseful no holds barred thriller; 2) Somehow, it’s incredibly funny; and 3) It’s all true. I don’t want to say if there’s only one film you can see at FLIFF39, it should be this, but…
DIRECTOR: Born in 1972 in Lausanne, Switzerland. He graduated in Visual Communication from École cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL) in 1996. In 2002, he founded the RiverBoom collective while in Afghanistan and published offbeat travel books ever since. His innovative approach in photography makes him one of the lead figures of new reportage, awarded in 2006 by the Grand Prix Vevey Images and nominated for the Prix Elysée in 2018. He’s now an investigative journalist and a filmmaker.
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