This coup is not a coup against the ruling order, a military platform called the Patriotic Movement for Safeguarding and Restoration ( Mouvement patriotique pour la sauvegarde et la restauration or MPSR) instead, it stems from young captains within the MPSR. ‘Things are gradually returning to order’, he said as Damiba went into exile in Togo. Captain Kiswendsida Farouk Azaria Sorgho declared on Radiodiffusion Télévision du Burkina (RTB), the national broadcast, that his fellow captain, Traoré, was now the head of state and the armed forces. The second coup was swift, with brief clashes in Burkina Faso’s capital of Ouagadougou at the president’s residence, Kosyam Palace, and at Camp Baba Sy, the military administration’s headquarters. ![]() On 30 September 2022, Captain Ibrahim Traoré led a section of the Burkina Faso military to depose Lieutenant Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, who had seized power in a coup d’état in January. Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. World sales are courtesy of Syndicado.Wilfried Balima (Burkina Faso), Les Trois Camarades (‘The Three Comrades’), 2018. Additional support comes from the Bundeskanzleramt Österreich. Please Hold the Line was produced by Pavel Cuzuioc under his Pavel Cuzuioc Filmproduktion banner. Still, Please Hold the Line is an artful look at a part of Europe grasping towards connection, and the unsung workers who help achieve this. The rounds of electricians calmly tweaking fuse boxes do represent something larger, although its point may be too subtle to fully register in its compact runtime. Like in the features and documentaries of Corneliu Porumboiu, Cuzuioc gets some mileage out of subverting mundane instances of bureaucracy. With these eclectic references, we see Please Hold the Line’s strength as a stealth art film – its observant camera acting like a tuning fork, picking up strange echoes and vibrations. “In the beginning was the word,” he reminds us. There’s a picaresque feel: Oleg carries out repairs for an old painter who laments for the promise of true communism (for him represented by anarchist Peter Kropotkin), and for a Russian Orthodox priest who breaks the film’s fourth wall and lectures the camera about the book of Genesis’s prediction of our networked society. Diegetic audio news reports of the new president Volodymyr Zelensky’s inauguration punctuate the sound mix, as Ukraine’s recent history and the threat of fake news loom large. ![]() These are not digital natives: an old lady at his first home visit assumes that “input” means “in-butt”, as in one’s bottom.Īs it tracks Oleg’s work for Ukrtelecom, Ukraine’s monopolistic telephone company, the film fully clarifies its time frame (the spring of 2019) and set of themes. Ghenadie, working for Moldtelecom (Moldova’s national telecom operator), visits a clientele largely composed of elderly people, for whom internet and particularly TV are a necessity if they want to stay in touch with the wider world. Then, the editing jumps to locations in its direct vicinity we’re introduced to technicians at work on their maintenance jobs in Kyiv, Ukraine, Buzău County in Romania and the seaside resort of Tsavero in Bulgaria.Ĭuzuioc is particularly interested in Ghenadie from Moldova and Oleg, stationed in Kyiv. For viewers who aren’t familiar with electrical engineering, their effect is very mysterious – these grey, blinking boxes could be the difference between our ignorance and knowledge. The film begins in the aforementioned server farm in Cricova, Moldavia, elegantly presented in patient master shots that bring to mind Nikolaus Geyrhalter (Cuzuioc was actually the sound recordist on Geyrhalter’s recent film Earth ). But Cuzuioc uses this repetitive structure to make a more abstract point about the role of the mass media in our lives and our reliance on the imperfect hardware through which we access it. A multi-stranded road movie of sorts, Please Hold the Line has a deceptively simple premise: its aim is to document nothing more than an assortment of cable repairmen going about their work in their respective territories.
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