It's always very hard, impossible even, for me to sum up in a few sentences this "thing" which ends up becoming strangely complex, and on which one has spent most of one's time and energy for the past year and a half.

Moreover, I think that, even more so than my other films, Code Unknown resists this process and is harder to reduce to a single "theme". I think that, by reducing it to its most obvious ideas (the Babylonian confusion of languages, the incapacity to communicate, the coldness of the consumer society, xenophobia, etc. ), we cannot avoid a mere string of clichés. That is always what happens when you try to isolate "themes". To do so, in my opinion, a short summary is ample.

Furthermore, there is little that can be said outside the aesthetic framework of the film. Otherwise I would have written a newspaper article instead of making a film. I do not think that my opinions on these "themes" are of much interest to anyone - nor should they be - I am not a forger of "opinions". The interesting thing about a table is its quality, its shape, its functional nature, the way the material was shaped, not the cabinetmaker's opinion.

The only things that remain for me to say after the film is finished, and which might conceivably interest someone, are the questions which triggered and motivated the project, for my film is nothing other than an attempt to try out some of the solutions that one might put forward.

None of these questions are new, but they are topical in the light of the prevailing media scene. Of course they were chosen in an arbitrary and incomplete way, but I hope that they evoke something of the intellectual climate which led me to make Code Unknown.

Is truth the sum of what we see and hear?

Can reality be represented?

To the observer, what makes the represented object real, credible, or more precisely, worthy of being believed?

What is the responsibility of the puppet master if the puppet perfectly imitates real life?

In the world of moving pictures, are illusion and deception twins or merely closely related?

Are the answers lies?

Are the questions answers?

Is the fragment the aesthetic response to the incomplete nature of our perception?

Is editing the simulation of the whole?

Is precision an aesthetic or a moral category?

Can allusion replace description?

Is that which is off-camera more precise than that which is on?