We
Alice Diop
France | 2021 | 114 min
Language : French
Subtitles : English
Just like François Maspero at the end of the 1980s, Alice Diop takes us on a journey across the Parisian region to meet its inhabitants. Humble and attentive, the director takes a fresh look at a multicultural territory marked by History, far removed from the usual media caricatures.
“We are one people.” This statement, central to Alice Diop’s film, was issued in 2015 by the French newspaper Libération following the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher supermarket. Examining this premise, whose presence haunts the film, the filmmaker presents a sociological documentary essay that follows the RER B, a railway line that links the northern and southern suburbs of Paris. Along the way, she collects the stories and testimonies of their inhabitants, who come from a diverse range of geographical and socioeconomic backgrounds. This polysemic exploration brings together the innumerable life paths of this so-called “peri-urban” France, from the filmmaker’s own family to a series of characters she encounters along her travels: a Malian mechanic living in his car, a group of hunting enthusiasts, the numerous pensioners whom her sister looks after, and even the writer Pierre Bergounioux. This arresting cinematic gesture serves as a political response to the absence of "little lives" on our screens, “drawing them out of the obscurity in which they had been buried”.
Bastien Bento
Bastien Bento
Saint Omer, 2022
Nous, 2021
RER B, 2017
Vers la tendresse, 2016
La Permanence, 2016
La Mort de Danton, 2011
Les Sénégalaises et la Sénégauloise, 2007
Clichy pour l’exemple, 2006
La Tour du monde, 2006
Trailer
Photography
Sarah BlumSylvain VerdetClément Alline
Editing
Amrita David
Sound
Mathieu Farnarier
Production
Salbot SophieAthénaïse
Sales contact
Sophie SalbotAthénaïseAthenaises@orange.fr
