Snake Dance

Snake Dance, Manu Riche and Patrick Marnham’s documentary about the invention of the atomic bomb, has been awarded the Buyens-Chagoll Award, worth CHF5,000, at Switzerland’s Visions du Réel festival (20-27 April). The jury praised the film’s exceptional originality, its ethical and aesthetic values, and its unusual approach in tackling a subject like nuclear power without using any archive footage.

Snake Dance, which received its international premiere at Nyon’s Visions du Réel fest, revolves around the choices modern man has to make if he wishes to survive.

This week, the Open Doek Festival (20 – 29 April) kicked off in Turnhout, while Leuven is getting ready for the 8th edition of the International Documentary Festival DOCVILLE (27 April – 5 May). Both programs house a large selection of Flemish titles, ranging from Daniel Lambo’s Dry Branches of Iran to Berlinale attendees Anton Corbijn Inside Out andAsparragos.

For the eighth consecutive year, DOCVILLE highlights the best documentaries and awards prizes in various sections. This year, Flanders is well represented in its national competition with more than ten short and feature-length film titles.

Manu Riche & Patrick Marnham’s Snake Dance and Bram Van Paesschen’s Empire of Dust have been invited to the Etat d’Esprit section of the Visions du Réel International Film Festival (20-27 April) in Nyon, Switzerland. Both documentaries will compete for the festival’s Audience Award, worth more than €8,000.

Both documentaries are set in the Democratic Republic of Congo but take entirely different approaches. In Snake Dance, which premieres internationally in Nyon, director Manu Riche and English writer Patrick Marnham embark on a cross-cultural journey that retraces the events leading up to the making of the H-bomb. Through the writings of art historian Aby Warburg, Snake Dance composes a filmic essay of a world that now more than ever is on the verge of complete destruction.

Snake Dance is a story of two men in the New Mexico desert. One was a cultural theorist and art historian who went mad during the aftermath of the First World War. The other was a physicist… and he was the father of the atomic bomb. Aby Warburg (1866-1929) and J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) can be seen as twisted reflections of one another: brilliant, cultured polymaths. One believed fervently in the healing powers of ritual, the ‘snake dance’ of the New Mexican Indians. The other, whether wittingly or not, unleashed the forces of destruction.

Belgian documentary maker Manu Riche first met English writer Patrick Marnham when he was making The Man Who Wasn’t Maigret (2003), a documentary about the pipe-smoking, sex-obsessed Belgian crime novelist, Georges Simenon, the creator of Inspector Maigret. Marnham’s biography of Simenon was the inspiration for Riche’s film, scripted by Steve Hawes. Marnham himself appeared on camera in the doc.

After this initial collaboration, Riche and Marnham were eager to work together. Riche was keen at the time to make a film about Congo. Marnham was busy trying to write a book about Oppenheimer, a project he eventually shelved after he had a disagreement with his US publisher and discovered that three other books on the same subject were in the work. In Snake Dance, we see him making contact by phone with Oppenheimer’s reclusive son Peter, who seems fascinated by the project but is too wary to want to appear on camera himself.