Raphaël Girardot

After a 10-year absence, 27-year-old Amelie returns home to suburban Paris and the decaying motorcycle-dealership/junkyard where she was raised. Her hope is that time has healed the open wound of hostility between herself and her alcoholic older brother Adrien. Amelie dusts off an ancient motorcycle, revs it up, and practices riding inside the immense sphere of metal latticework constructed by her late father. The local popularity of this stunt suggests a broader appeal plus profits, so soon the act goes on the road, where emotions spin out of control.

In this French drama, a teenager falls into a life of crime, little realizing the consequences. S. is a moody young man who loses his job at a bakery, and decides to throw in his lot with a group of thieves about the same age as himself. S. and his cronies are strictly small-timers, pulling off second-rate break-ins for an older crime boss, but his willingness to do what he's told helps him rise up the ladder to bigger and more lucrative jobs. However, S. lacks the maturity or experience to deal with the risks, and after a few disastrous mistakes, he finds his fortunes sinking far faster than they rose.

In Gansu Province, northwest China, lie the remains of countless prisoners abandoned in the Gobi Desert sixty years ago. Designated as ultra-rightists in the Communist Party’s Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957, they starved to death in the reeducation camps. The film invites us to meet the survivors of the camps to find out firsthand who these persons were, the hardships they were forced to endure and what became their destiny.

Over many years, the director’s father filmed his family life almost obsessively. His daughter’s birth, his son’s first steps, and always Valérie, the young mother. An impressive fund of material which their now grown-up daughter Faustine appropriates to tell quite a different story: that of a woman who sees her role as a mother and its demands take away her freedom step by step.

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Alain Crezé saw his entire herd go to slaughter because of a single case of mad cow. He wants to leave the farming profession. It is less a whim than a fed up: "before we fed people, today we enrich the food industry". He is 45 years old. Convert but to do what? The questions of work, of "know-how", of the desire to exercise a trade rather than occupying a job, of lifelong training, of acceptance of the rules of the system then arise.

In a humanitarian camp opened in Paris, refugees are in transit. In this "first reception" center, they are resting from the street where they were stranded when they arrived in France. A few days of humanity, that we spend with them. But already, they have to face the Prefecture and hear the cold administrative sentence. We are always with them.

They grew up in the land of dictators and surveillance, where images are censored, photos are burned, thoughts are discreet, and mouths are kept shut. They grew up in Syria.

In a slaughterhouse—a symbol of a working world that hides its laborers and the “dirty work”—men and women oscillate between pride in their craftsmanship and exhaustion from the labor. They speak of the physical strain, the dangers, and the precariousness of their jobs. They are cutters, slaughterers, skinning workers, stampers, and blooders…

Vincent Gaullier and Raphaël Girardot weave together threads of reflection in tribute to the pioneering political ecologist Bruno Latour, who passed away in 2022, in a stimulating documentary essay.