Jean-Stéphane Bron
Switzerland | 1997 | 61 min
Language : French
Subtitle : English
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Bern Federal Police revealed they had been keeping activists from far-left groups in Western Switzerland under surveillance for years - among them, Claude Muret. In his first film, Jean-Stéphane Bron deploys a humorous and affectionate gaze to chronicle the story of these ex-“cops and outlaws” who come from a generation marked by clashes… of ideology.
Minimum legal age 12 years, recommended 16 years and over
In the thick package he receives from Bern, fifty-something Claude Muret finds typed reports that lead him to reminisce about his past. He discovers that whole swathes of his life, which he considered to be “his” personal memory, had been scrupulously recorded by the security police in Lausanne. Between the moment he took part in a peace protest as a teenager to his marriage in 1977, this communist militant was put under surveillance, like other members of the radical left in French-speaking Switzerland. “You have to assess the balance of power,” a former police officer’s moustache, filmed in extreme close-up, cheerfully justifies in retrospect. For his first produced documentary, Jean-Stéphane Bron explores the “Muret file” and through it, summons up a generation marked by essentially ideological conflicts. Connu de nos services measures - not without humour, and with much tenderness - the gap between the facts related in the files, and the vivid memory that participants from both sides still retain thirty years later.
Emmanuel Chicon
