At Uz, an isolated hamlet in the northern mountains of Portugal, four generations live together in a group of around fifty people. When life is rough, solidarity is of the highest order. Everything else is left in God’s hands. They could have emigrated, like so many others, but chose to stay and keep their ancestral way of life, away from the racket of modernity.
Opening with the testimony of a politically exiled Basque author reminiscing on a childhood where he was forced to “hide his language as something ugly”, Faire la parole then keeps apace with some young people from the French and Spanish Basque Country: Nora, who saw the newspaper where she worked closed by the Guardia Civil in 2003, then Aitor, Ana and Ortzi. The last three, still teenagers, lend a summery and easy-going tone to the film, which is magnificently framed by Eugène Green’s long-time cameraman, Raphael O’Byrne. The dialogue that settles in between the younger members and those in their thirties has a rare quality, as if the difference of language – which each has had to impose on their family or on their national entourage – had almost tacitly created a secret community. Starting with the political stakes (regional languages versus centralism), the story hikes over the mountains with these new friends brought together by the filmmaker.
Off Nagasaki, my boat docks on the shores of Hashima, an abandoned island which once harboured an important mining community until one day, in 1974, its population was summarily evicted. I collect archives on the life that was once lived here, I wander through the ruins as I wander through my memory, looking for a missing image.
From the 1840s until the 1940s, anonymous Afro-American women made rag dolls for their own children or for the white children they were looking after. Black, injured, forgotten and magnificent dolls, gathered together over the years in Debbie Neff’s collection, here lend their moving expressive features to the women that a century of slavery, segregation and racism tried to silence. Far from being the mute witnesses of their suffering, dreams and courage, these objects haunted by so many stories become, for the length of this film, the intermediaries of a discourse of self-affirmation and liberation. From Sojourner Truth to Maya Angelou,
Neither a fiction nor a documentary, it is a film-dance. Not a narrative, but a journey through the Villeneuve area of Grenoble. No characters, but energies, encounters. The body of a dancer in the city. An essay of re-enchantment.
