Alice Diop films her suburb of Essonne, where she lives, and crossed by line B of the RER, common thread of her fourth documentary, We, in theaters Wednesday, February 16. This unifying title sums up the filmmaker’s philosophy, for which the stories of immigrants arriving in France, and the identity of the host country, are not contradictory, but mutually enriching.
From a hunt with hounds in the forest of Rambouillet, to the words of kids on the steps of the housing estates, passing by the Diop family of Senegalese origin, or the annual mass commemorating the death of Louis XVI, the film portrays a multiple France, whose contradictions and incommunicability are only apparent.
In these times when the presidential campaign favors the theme of immigration, Alice Diop’s film has a counter-current statement that is good to see and hear. In an experimental approach, the filmmaker claims the attention of the viewer immersed in a succession of stories that are told, meet, observe and gauge each other. The final interview by Alice Diop of her mentor Pierre Bergougnoux exposes her convictions as a filmmaker, both in the form and in the subject of her films, which are fundamentally political.
The film begins with a young adult of Malian origin, who has been in France for over twenty years, talking with his mother on the phone in his native language without subtitles. A somewhat harsh opening, but which induces the acceptance of difference. You can’t escape your native language, don’t you say mother tongue? Alice Diop’s first amateur films follow on from her family and her father’s interview about her arrival and her life in France, which announce the ecumenical discourse that the director will adopt. Thus the contrast with traditions from French history (hunting, Louis XVI), shows cohabitation and tolerance; the exchanges between the Senegalese home visitor and the elderly people she cares for reflect mutual respect and interest.
At a time when many fictions take a more or less documentary form, Alice Diop gives a fictional dimension to her presentation in her treatment of the image. The city, the districts, stations and other axes of transport are filmed with attentive care which dramatizes the subject. The different media – family films, digital, color casts – feed the film with a beautiful graphic richness. Alice Diop ends up with a humanist message on a France that ignores the cohesion that inhabits it.
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Kind : Documentary
Director: Alice Diop
Duration : 1h57
Country : France
Exit : February 16, 2022
Distributer : New Story
Summary: A line, the RER B, crossing from north to south. A journey inside these indistinct places that we call the suburbs. Meetings: a housekeeper in Roissy, a scrap dealer in Le Bourget, a nurse in Drancy, a writer in Gif-sur-Yvette, the follower of a hunt in the Chevreuse valley and the filmmaker who revisits the place of her childhood. Each is part of a set that makes up a whole. A possible “we”.