"In 1996, I was staying in the village of Mankien in South Sudan to film the war which was taking place. At the time, I thought that making a film about an area struggling with such a severe conflict would almost have to be an act of duty. Once there, the reality appeared completely different from what I initially imagined it would be. The war that was all around me was not only a struggle between an oppressive government and a downtrodden minority but a latent conflict driven by power and economic interests. Back in Belgium, I felt overwhelmed by a strong feeling of helplessness and disillusionment to the point of never showing these images, up to now. A short while ago, I was told that the village of Mankien had been subjected to a massacre orchestrated by the Khartoum government with more than the slight complicity of Western oil companies. Closed District is not only a film about the war in South Sudan, but more about wars in general, about the death and distress that often ensues. It also raises the question of the filmmaker's place in a situation of conflict". (Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd)

In military terminology, inner lines are escape routes which are located near opposing lines. They provide a way of passing undetected and fleeing. Around Mount Ararat, in Turkey and Armenia, messengers and their carrier pigeons travel along these parallel paths to meet up with communities in the grip of war. During their wanderings, they encounter Yezidis who have fled from the atrocities committed by Daesh and found refuge in transit camps in Turkey. They stand beside the last living survivors of the Armenian genocide. They travel around war-torn Nagorno-Karabakh, to accompany and support the bereaved families there. Throughout the story, men and women bear witness to what they have endured, to their shattered lives, to life, fighting off death. Above all, their words tell a tale of violence inflicted by men on other men, a violence that seems everlasting and obstinate.

Those who suffer from the melancholy of eternity are called eternals. Convinced that death cannot take their lives, they believe they are condemned to wander around waiting for the day when they will be released from their existence. This film is a tale of wanderings and escapes, on the borders of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan. Inhabited by the ghosts of the genocide and by the war that has been raging there for more than twenty years, the characters who traverse this film carry within them the melancholy of the eternal.

Drawing from stories of flight, exile, interminable waiting and arrest, and persecuted lives on both sides of the wall that divides the Western Sahara, Territoire perdu bears witness to the Sahrawi people, their land and their entrapment in other people’s dreams.  The film juxtaposes sonorous landscapes, black-and-white portraits and nomadic poetics.