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« The film project was to put into images and sounds the journeys of seven participants, all living in the Saint Jean district (Villeurbanne) and coming from different countries and continents (Asia, Maghreb, Eastern Europe).
The writing workshop, led by Justin Follenfant, was a preliminary and essential step in the making of the film. Its aim was to accompany each individual in the production of a particular text and in the expression of their subjectivity through poetic inflection. It’s the energy of memory that had to be revived; an energy that it’s been possible to awaken, to channel and to reinvent, thanks to the practice of writing. This was an ambitious programme for people who were learning French, who had to activate all their resources.
However, this risk-taking enabled the participants, through the workshop process and according to their own abilities, to make a linguistic transition from their original languages tothe so-called “host language”. Through the act of writing in a foreign language, the participants relived the experience of displacement, beyond the original geographical displacement that took them from one country to another.
A bit outside of time, between reality and imagination, they take us far from here. »
Marie-Jeanne Verneret,
Teacher at FLE (French as a foreign language)
This film evokes the themes of displacement, separations, space and time, and takes us into a poetic and metaphorical universe by proposing to reproduce, in images and sounds, the journeys of seven people who’ve been attending the Linguistic Socialisation workshop of the Animation Centre of Saint Jean.
The protagonist of the film is the voice: a voice with seven ramifications, relating to seven individualities, to seven lives, all of them crossed by the process of migration, whose origins were diverse for each of them: family, political or economic. This process, according to Hannah Arendt, represents «the experience of loss».
