Life Without Death

The fact that noted Ottawa filmmaker Frank Cole was murdered by bandits in the Mali desert in October 2000 lends an almost unbearable poignancy to Life Without Death, the macabre, minimalist, death-obsessed first-person account of Cole’s record-breaking solo trek across the Sahara a decade earlier. In 1990, following the death of his grandfather, Cole set out, Bolex movie camera in hand, to confront his own mortality by embarking on a lunatic 7,000-kilometre crossing, via camel, of the African desert from Mauritania to Sudan. This self-shot, diaristic film, which took Cole over a decade to edit, chronicles the remarkably arduous journey, the horrible toll it takes on Cole’s body, and the human dangers — civil wars, suspicious authorities, marauders — he was forced to contend with along the way. The result is a haunting, meditative, one-of-a-kind work of intense power and poetry. Cole’s murder occurred while he was attempting another Sahara crossing. “The year’s strangest movie . . . 83 minutes of gut-shot pain with the laconic finality of a suicide note” (Montreal Gazette). Colour and B&W, 35mm. 83 mins.