Manon Ott
France | 2018 | 70 min
World premiere
Language : French
Subtitle : English
Les Mureaux, in the Paris area. The social housing areas awake to a black and white that rubs out the anticipated greyness of the districts. A few kilometres away, the Renault plants still employ a number of the inhabitants, starting with the children of those who were brought in from Africa and the Maghreb in the 1960s. What remains of the working class? Outside a block of flats, at the entrance to the factory with the unionised and the militants, or on the shore of a lake, Manon Ott nourishes her film with the speech of those who live there, be it reasoned, soft, rebellious or sung. From the social struggles of the past to the precariousness of modern slaves, the unemployed and the temporary workers, she constructs a collective discourse of absolute intelligence about the working world. She breaks away from the clichés of the suburbs, immigration and delinquency or, rather, economic resistance, as one of the protagonists puts it. And when at the end of the night, this ex-con who read Karl Marx and Rimbaud in jail recounts his childhood as a suburban kid hungry to earn fast money, the smouldering fire reveals the political power of a film that is at once sensitive and subversive.
Céline Guénot
