La Base
Vadim Dumesh / France / 2023 / International Premiere / 72 min
Social-realist sci-fi from the taxi centre around a Paris airport that looks more like a run-down space base where an incredible cast of characters cross each other's paths.
The planes take off and land at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, while the taxi drivers queue up and wait for their turn to drive. Their job is to get people from A to B, but what do they do before and after? ‘La base’ is a hyper-realistic report from a near future where humans and machines enter into a surreal symbiosis with each other around the base behind the airport where the taxi drivers hang out. A world of plastic bottles, cigarette butts, prepaid phone cards and live streaming that anthropologist Marc Augé would call a certified ‘non-space’, but which is a second (sometimes the only) home for the incredible cast of characters we meet in Vadim Dumesh’s film from the futuristic microcosm. Parts of the film are shot by the eccentric drivers themselves on their phones while jet engines thunder overhead and rumours of driverless cars loom on the horizon. ‘La Base’ would have been J.G. Ballard’s favourite film – now it can be yours instead.