Charbon

Manu Riche
Promotors: Klaas Tindemans, Karel Vanhaesebrouck, Guy Gypens

Charbon is a PhD research and a film about my continent Europe and me. I was born in coal and came of age in petroleum and will die in the changing climate of renewable energy....

This film is the story of my grandfather, the coal engineer, it is the story of my father the petroleum dealer. It is a farewell to a certain Europe, to my Europe. It is a journey eastwards, into the deep layers and stratifications of contemporary Europe. The film follows the coal seam from west to east, to the contours of the European body. To the conflicts of the body. It narrates its metamorphoses as if it were a body. As if it were my body. The body Europe takes the form of Curzio Malaparte in his journey east to the Volga, where Hitler's troops were stopped and his tanks run out of mazout.

The film follows Carlo (or is it Hayder Helo or is it me) the main character in Petrolio, Pier Paolo Pasolini's last unfinished book. For Pasolini, Carlo was the story of Enrico Mattei, the murdered director of the then Italian petroleum company ENI. We follow him through the streets from Beirut to Baghdad along the Sykes-Picot line. The border line between Syria and Iraq. The rapidly depleting petroleum reservoir of Europe and the West. In Baghdad, Hayder Helo, the returned Iraqi refugee or is it Carlo arrives at a huge party full of dancing soldiers. The film ends in the navel of body Europe, along the shores of the Mediterranean between Sicily and Naples, between Catania and the shores of Lake Como, in stasis. In the no-man's land between Italy and France. It cries and weeps with Malaparte to the landlocked, to the dying interior, to FIAT's robots and to the dented Alfa Romeo GTV of the murdered Pasolini. It is a farewell to me and the body Europe yearns for new energy.