Reviewed by: Camille réal. par Boris Lojkine Brigitte Stepanov Lojkine, Boris, réal. Camille. Int. Nina Meurisse, Fiacre Bindala, Bruno Todeschini. Unité de Production, 2019. The eponymous Camille Lepage (Nina Meurisse) was a photojournalist from France who died in 2014 at the age of 26 in the Central African Republic while documenting the country's still ongoing civil war. Lojkine's biopic details Camille's two journeys to the CAR, showcasing the close ties she cultivates with university students caught up in the escalating violence and the professional relationships she develops with other European journalists in her attempt to publish her photographs of an underreported war. Over the course of the film's 93 minutes, we see Camille incessantly take photos in the CAR, chronicling the fighting between the Séléka and anti-balaka militias. Just enough context—in the form of blocks of onscreen text—is given to understand the intricacies of the conflict that she catches on camera. Though the war is central to the narrative, the film most actively emphasizes Camille's drive to create an archive of life marked by quotidian violence in the landlocked nation in Central Africa. She shoots photos constantly, capturing a broad scope of subjects, including students, protests, buildings, and streets. At times the people she photographs tell her—laughingly, in part—that they are tired of her unabating documentation. At other moments, she is urgently asked to gather visual evidence of civil unrest, revolt, destruction, and loss. But the representation of photography in the film does not simply convey Camille's profession. This is not only an account of her journalistic endeavors and the moments leading up to her death, but also a reflection on form, medium, and, specifically, the materiality of photographs. While we witness the act of photographing repeated throughout the film, more significantly, actual photos abound in Camille. Indeed, the real Camille's work saturates our screens. By watching Camille, we end up seeing what the photographer herself had seen. For example, we observe Meurisse visiting the site of a recent massacre, walking in a grassy patch next to the side of a road. With each snap of her camera on screen, we see an actual photo that was taken by Lepage. Another scene recreates the image of a man with an umbrella. The [End Page 299] film sets up what could have been the immediate moments preceding the composition and capture of this instance—and instant. On screen, a man walks through a narrow hallway lined with corpses and we notice him begin to open an umbrella in order to step out into the rainy outdoors. Once the umbrella is in full view, the film comes to a standstill by becoming Camille's real photo. Camille thus overlays media, playing with the limits between photography and video, and rendering the border between still and moving images opaque. In turn, it documents the act of documentation itself, laying bare the truth-seeking and archive-creating drives behind journalism. Most poignantly, the film asks us to consider how images are framed and what context surrounds them, making us realize how little we know about anything that falls outside a camera's curated field of view. Brigitte Stepanov Grinnell College (IA) Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French