Film Review: FRAGMENTS FROM HEAVEN: A Sparse Yet Contemplative Doc About Our Place in Space (and Rocks, Too) [Locarno 2022]

Fragments from Heaven Review

Fragments from Heaven (2022) Film Review from the 75th Annual Locarno Film Festival, a documentary written and directed by Adnane Baraka.

I’m confident in proclaiming Locarno to be the go-to festival when it comes to avant-garde documentaries. Granted, that’s only based on two years’ worth of attendance (virtually, mind you, and from a distance) but the docs that come out of this fest have shown a most creative sense of subjectivity beyond just that of the journalistic variety. These films’ basic presentations of their facts that allegedly document some iteration of “real life” are skewed in a way that subverts our assumptions on how reality should be presented in the first place. Sometimes it works to astounding results; other times, not so much. Adnane Baraka’s Fragments from Heaven falls somewhere in the middle in that its artistry never quite renders its message as a revelatory one but a wholly engrossing one nonetheless, and with a unique metaphysical perspective.

The doc is slow and sparse, showcasing its subjects “talking” almost exclusively through an inner monologue that’s superimposed on the visuals via whisper. The main juxtaposition is between Mohamed, a nomadic farmer, and Abderrahmane, a university professor, and their shared fascination with the meteorites that landed in the Moroccan desert. Mohamed believes them to be sacred objects that fell to earth that could pull in a pretty penny, and joins a group of amateur rock foragers to go search them out. Abderrahmane, on the other hand, is fascinated in the atomic make-up of these particles, and what information they might hold about the formation of the universe.

It’s an interesting contrast that Baraka posits: Mohamed is out searching for an unknown, whereas Abderrahmane wants to clarify said unknown. The base-level read is a spiritual-versus-secular one, of course, but the doc blurs the line to suggest there’s not as drastic a difference between the two ideologies, or even the two people, than we might think.

Mohamed’s wonder and reverence is shown via his long, pensive gazes at the cloudy Moroccan sky, whereas Abderrahmane’s is expressed in excited adulations toward his university students as he pushes them into abstract thinking concerning the paradoxes of life on Earth. These rocks will lead to honor and glory for both of the men in one way or another, but they will also lead to the selfless provision of life in one way or another: money for Mohamed to provide for his family, and knowledge for Abderrahmane to bestow upon his pupils.

Baraka takes the aforementioned subjectivity and adapts it to a universal (or at least planetary) scale: the world contains all of us, but the reverence we hold towards it manifests itself in many different ways.

When it comes to familiar cinematic landmarks, you can find Fragments from Heaven among the more recent Malick musings and the hypnotic visuals of Ron Fricke (whose 1992 documentary’s title, coincidentally, shares the surname with FfH’s director). While Baraka is not a Fricke nor a Lubezki in terms of his camerawork, his patience and general steadiness (with a few camera shakes thrown in for good measure that in all honesty adds some first-timer charm to the ordeal) allows for the Moroccan expanse to be gorgeously subsumed. InCave and SENT’s droning score lulls us into a beautiful and at times otherworldly state – a perfect addition to the third-act animated reimagining of Earth’s formation.

This can all start to feel somewhat excessive after a while – which is ironic, given the film’s lean 85-minute runtime. The endless and smooth synths, when coupled with the heavy philosophizing of the “dialogue” (which itself can start to feel detached from the doc’s core subjects), makes for perfect sleepy cinema for the unprepared. Looked at another way, it’s a gilded thematic flourish made to hide a deceptively simple premise.

But even if it’s a tad hollow, Fragments from Heaven is beautiful and contemplative enough to inebriate the senses and kickstart the imagination. Rather than taking you to the stars, Baraka revels in what the stars have already created here on Earth. I, for one, can co-sign that subjective reality.

Rating: 6/10

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