Ali Cherri’s new film The Sentinel places a French military recruit between two very different kinds of routine.
By day there is the ordered structure of military life. At night, encounters begin to disturb the stability of that system. The film appears in Soul Witness, opening at WIELS in Brussels on 5 September 2026, alongside sculptures and installations concerned with the ways institutions shape bodies and historical memory.
What interests me is how far this is from the traditional image of the soldier as monument.
Public sculpture often turns military bodies into symbols: upright, permanent, certain.
Cherri focuses instead on vulnerability and suspension.
A real body gets tired.
It waits.
It doubts.
It exists inside rules it did not invent.
Moving image is useful here because a monument tries to freeze meaning, while film allows behaviour to remain unresolved. A character can contradict himself from one moment to the next.
Perhaps that is why institutions like statues.
Still images are easier to control.
A moving body is always capable of becoming something else.
