La Dernière rive

​​January 2017. A mobile phone records a man slipping beneath the surface of Venice’s Grand Canal, while vile racist taunts echo off-screen. He was young. Gambian. His name was Pateh Sabally. The video of his drowning went viral, even reaching the country where he had grown up surrounded by his family. Jean-François Ravagnan made the journey in the opposite direction, to listen. As a white man, it was the very least he could do. His chosen silence — extended through precise, contemplative framing — creates space for the voices of the bereaved to inhabit the places their lost one once passed through, bringing him back to life through the power of oral testimony. Through their words, he returns from the land of the dead, his memory shaped and refracted by the camera’s lens, which gently blurs the scene of the tragedy, both literally and metaphorically. Out of respect for Yarro and his loved ones, who will never see Venice — “to die there,” like their son — La Dernière Rive offers a rare experience: to stand alongside those left behind, those consumed by guilt, as they reconstruct a life from memory alone, weaving with their words the shroud of remembrance.
Emmanuel Chicon

La Dernière rive, 2025
Renaître, 2015