La Jetée, the Fifth Shot

When filmmaker Dominique Cabrera hears that her cousin believes he recognizes himself and his parents in the fifth shot of Chris Marker’s influential photo film La Jetée, she knows she has to make a film about it. The result is this engaging, exploratory documentary—a search for the meaning of image, memory, time, coincidence, nostalgia, and kinship.

Through conversations with her own relatives, and people from Marker’s circle, Cabrera tries to establish how likely it is that the boy with sticking-out ears on the Orly Airport pier—identified by the narrator as the younger version of the story’s protagonist—is indeed her nephew Jean-Henri. And if so, why was he there? And what caught Marker’s attention?

The exodus of the pied-noirs at the end of the Algerian War of Independence is among the subjects touched upon in this intuitive journey through time to the origin of a single image. Along the way, the filmmaker encounters many parallels and similarities between her family’s history and the themes that run through Marker’s work.