Le Passeur

"The water of the Ganges is present in the life of every Hindu, playing a purifying role from birth to death. It is on this river that the film unfolds, in search of that deep and startling something, which even those not born on Indian soil can be affected by. The film is the tail of small encounters, small facts, which occur without reason or conclusion, in the course of a hypothetical day. There is the river; animated by ancestral forms, and in the background the city that lives, preys, marries and dies.
After meeting Gopal, the boatman, and spending one day on the boat with him as a tourist, the structure of the film took shape in my mind. I wanted to recreate the atmosphere of that day and Gopal himself the self-professed tourist-cheating boatman became my narrator and protagonist. Over a period of three years I went to Benares eight times. For two to three weeks on each trip I meet Gopal at sunrise and stayed on the boat with him until dusk. Some days we rowed from places to places without turning on the camera; other days were full of events.
Creating the illusion of a moving point of view, (from within the boat) the film takes on the shape of a journey without destination. Various characters and images appear and disappear from the screen, and Gopal, the boatman, is the only constant point of reference. In Benares, city of dead, the dead, like the unconscious, are the voice of the mocking and unresolved, which systematically interrupt the sequence of the film, as if to discreetly transgress the taboos which we the living, in the west, carefully avoid."
(Gianfranco Rosi)