Les Vies d'Andrès – Films – Visions du Réel

The Multiple Lives of Andres

Baptiste Janon & Rémi Pons
Belgium, Switzerland | 2025 | 91 min
World premiere
Language : French
Subtitles : English

Jury Prize in the National Competition offered by SRG SSR

Inspired by a novel by B. Traven about the life of Andrès Ugalde, a cart driver in 1920s Mexico, this film depicts his contemporary twin, a truck driver for a small transport company in Europe. As he puts in the hours, stuck in a race for profit, “Andrès” serves as a cog in a system that exhausts the men who make it function, and in so doing exhausts itself.

A container lorry rumbles into the night, headlights blazing, heading toward a warehouse where its trailer will soon be loaded with a first consignment—one that must be dropped off somewhere, before setting off again toward another destination. Baptiste Janon and Rémi Pons follow the daily routines of four truck drivers, employees of a small transport company, whose world recalls B. Traven’s novel The Carreta. In that story, set in post-revolutionary 1920s Mexico, Traven examined the capitalist organisation of freight transport through the journey of a humble cart driver, Andrès Ugalde. A voice-over reads excerpts from the book, which, a century later, eerily and powerfully echo the lives of today’s “Andrès,” caught in a relentless spiral made ever more oppressive by the demands of performance, and the cold precision of logistics. Of course, this race against the clock has a cost, that surfaces in quiet exchanges within the cabs. Deliver at all costs, ever faster: an injunction that is slowly exhausting the men who are keeping alive the very system that is wearing them to the bone.
Emmanuel Chicon

Baptiste Janon
Les Vies d'Andrès, 2025
Dernière pêche, 2017
Quand est-ce que je les ai vus s'embrasser, 2013

Rémi Pons
Les Vies d'Andrès, 2025