La Jetée" is not just one of the best short films we will ever see. It's one of the best films ever, period. Such rating, transforming the art of cinema into a horse racing of sensibility and intellect, would not please Chris Marker. Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve (1921-2012) is one of the freest filmmakers I've met or know. A subtle sense of humor is added to freedom - his stage name was chosen after a pen, 1953’s Magic Marker - and an obsession with the emotional mechanisms of memory. "La Jetée", which now celebrates its 55th birthday, is described by Marker as a photonovel. Formally, since it uses a sequence of photographs and a voice-over as narrative thread, it might be. But this almost ontological essay, of what it is to be human, soon abandons the apparent coldness of its trouvaille, resulting in an unforgettable multifaceted portrait, between individuality and civilization (like all of his work), of the effects of memories in personal and collective identity. For Marker, all time is unique, especially the one which repeats itself, and each memory is as elusive and mysterious as the filmmaker himself. He is an ethnographer of the soul, and to watch "La Jetée" reminds us that the future is always, ultimately, the puzzle of an interior landscape. We can only contemplate it. (Pedro Marta Santos)