“We talked about Gagarin as a person, practically.“Gagarin, for them, was more than these red brick buildings. Gagarin is where they lived, even grew up. But in 2020, the city is destroyed, in an urban renewal plan. Adnane Tragha lived opposite the big red walls. He decided to film the last moments of the city, with its inhabitants. They tell him about their memories in this emblematic city of the Parisian suburbs. “Often, we talk about young people from the neighborhoods, we say that they don’t feel French, that they don’t want to work, that they don’t study, that they hold the walls, that they struggle. I wanted to take these ex-young people, 20 years later, and show what they have become”, explains the director.
“I left each time, until I went to the United States for 6 years, to Boston, to Harvard. I was seen as the little Frenchy who was coming, in fact. It was in the United States that I felt completely French, oddly”, says a former resident. “I couldn’t see myself leaving, I couldn’t see myself getting out of here. The outside, the border, it wasn’t very far, two, three streets further, it could be scary”, recalls Vincent, who grew up in the neighborhood.
“Those for whom it was the most difficult to leave the estate were the retirees, so it was our parents’ generation to whom we said: ‘We’re going to have to leave.’ And who realized they were only tenants and it wasn’t their home”, explains the director. “For most of my generation, there was a side: ‘Well, she’s had her day, what.’ We moved on.”