"The Great Wall", Tadhg O’Sullivan, 2016.When Europe is busying itself building fences, strengthening its borders, and electing far-right parties onto mainstream platforms for them to advocate building more fences and the further tightening of borders, and when we’re bombarded daily with the EU referendum debate about how to protect Britain against outsiders and to ‘take back our country’, don’t we all feel in need of the fresh air of sanity? The Great Wall, a beautifully filmed and soberly narrated feature documentary directed by Tadhg O’Sullivan, offers exactly that.
Based loyally on Franz Kafka’s short story “The Building of the Great Wall of China”, O’Sullivan’s work puts Europe’s wall-building under an intense gaze. It begins at Melilla, a Spanish enclave in North Africa (claimed by Morocco as occupied territory) where Europe’s only land border with Africa is marked by a three-metre barbed fence. It resembles, at first glance, the separation wall in Palestine that O’Sullivan visited before the idea of filming The Great Wall came into shape. Shot in eleven countries, O’Sullivan magnifies such borders in front of our eyes, and challenges viewers to question their own imagined nationhood and their (albeit passive) defence of these militarised frontiers of the continent.
As O’Sullivan’s camera traces the long fence at Europe’s doorstep, Kafka’s fable of nation-building follows the fictional character of a mason who left his village to join tens of thousands of workers in the grand task of building the great wall at the centre of the world. Construction of the wall was conducted in piecemeal sections, by teams of workers. Each team took on a five-hundred-metre-long section of the wall, and then on completion of the section, was sent off to build another section of the wall somewhere else. Workers were able to see other teams working on various different sections of the wall, which made them feel very much part of a grand project, and gave them a great sense of pride and personal responsibility. However, mysteriously, the workers never saw the separate wall sections continued, and never witnessed the great wall completed.
