Lack of Evidence (Manque de preuves) by Hayoun Kwon

Lack of Evidence (Manque de preuves) is an animated documentary about Oscar, a young asylum seeker from Nigeria whose father killed his twin brother in a religious ritual and planned to do the same with him. However, he can’t offer the material proof to support his story and therefore can’t obtain asylum in France.

Oscar’s story is a perfect, but also a tragic example of how the facts from one culture lose their value when transported into another. The brilliant thing about Lack of Evidence is that it doesn’t stop at a re-telling of Oscar’s story, but also finds a visual equivalent to point out its inner frictions and complexities. Presenting a genre of documentary through animation alone serves as a strong statement. Only Oscar’s drawing and his typed testimony are filmed (“documented”) as (f)actual objects, while everything else is reconstructed through animation. This approach clearly illustrates the fragility of Oscar’s story, which leaves the impression of a folk tale or a children fantasy struggling to gain the strength of “something real”. In a culture with an exclusively positivistic approach of representing reality, it is a battle already lost.

Lack of Evidence is extremely well thought-out even in the types of animation that it uses. It starts with a scene of a village from a fairytale, which gradually exposes itself as 3D animation. Shot in a simulated one-take, the 3D gradually turns into Oscar’s real life, with an unanimated drawing placed on a desk of an office. However, the office space is again illustrated/animated, but through a different technique of simple black lines and devoid of color. The drawing stands on the friction between two different styles of animation; or, one could say, two different mind sets with different means of creating the image of reality. Emphasizing the illustrated basis of both worlds, Lack of Evidence suggests that the way the reality is shaped and organized into systems of representation is in both cases equally artificial.

By Mario Kozina