Review of the film “Bridge” by Sahil

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In Bridge, the filmmaker returns to a place where he once experienced a difficult period of his life. Shot in a single take at night, it shows a quiet canal in Brussels, a few passing cars and people walking by, streetlights reflected on the water, faint city sounds. For those familiar with the city, the scenery is easily recognisable – the canal, the windmills moving, the proximity to the Petit Château. Yet Bridge reframes this ordinary landscape through a deeply personal lens.

The film contrasts the simplicity of this scenery sharply with the intensity of the voice-over. The off-screen narrator recounts his lived experience of homelessness upon arriving in Belgium. The narration is very straight forward and honest. Nothing to eat, nothing to drink, the cold. Through this simple yet powerful juxtaposition of sound and image, the film exposes the distance between what is seen and what is lived – revealing urban indifference and the unnoticed coexistence of comfort and displacement. People keep on passing by in the frame while the off-voice describes a parallel reality – one of exclusion and endurance.

At one point, the narrator begins to speak about his mother. He recalls her calls from home, her worry, her tears. He lies to her, assuring her that he has everything he needs, in order to protect her from worry. Language itself becomes a central element. The narrator speaks in English, a language not his own, and at one point sings to his mother in Pashto. The use of language becomes a form of resistance against dominant cinematic norms of fluency and polish, that give no space to the marginalised. The film performs a subtle but radical gesture – it allows the subject to speak back through sound rather than image. It was the discomfort of realising how easily such stories are made invisible, and how rarely they are told by the people themselves.In the final thirty seconds, the camera moves for the first time. It turns quickly, revealing the full surroundings. For a brief second, we see the Petit Château – a building once served as prison, now functioning as a reception centre – and finally points to the ground – the exact spot where the narrator once slept. This gesture feels deliberate and empowering: he decides what to show, how much, and how detailed. The bridge becomes both a site of pain and of authorship. The film might be about homelessness and displacement, but it is equally about reclaiming one’s story.

The choice of a one-shot composition adds to the feeling of endurance. There is no editing to hide behind, no narrative progression – only duration, stillness, and testimony. The film doesn’t dramatise suffering, it invites us to sit with it, quietly.

Ultimately, Bridge is not only a testimony of hardship but also a quiet act of reclaiming narrative power. It shows that the most meaningful cinema does not depend on spectacle or technical perfection, but on the urgency of having something to say – something real, relevant, and rooted in lived experience.