Honk - (To Stop Executions)

"As we know, the death penalty is in force in some States in the U.S. As we know? It is precisely the nature of this knowledge – its distance, abstraction and the perverse simplicity of the application of such a law, that Arnaud Gaillard and Florent Vassault call into question, as so many others have before them. They choose to avoid two pitfalls as they do so: they neither maintain the abstraction by using brushstrokes that are too broad for such a thick dossier, nor do they seek to blind us through pathos
by only showing particular pain. They have also taken it upon themselves to focus on three encounters, in order to reconstruct three experiences, rather than try and use a whole range of condemned men, who for the most part are invisible anyway – the family of a victim who has chosen to be present at the execution of the murderer; a man tried on the basis of a legal error; the mother of a man imprisoned not far from her home. In the middle of these witness accounts, a lawyer talks explicitly about the
broader historical context of his country. If the film does not claim to be any more than a honk, like the one the mother blows forth from the third set of shutters on the road running alongside the prison – so giving the film its title, it is a resounding wake-up call reminding us of this scandal."
(Jean-Pierre Rehm, FID Marseille)