De l’autre côté de l’eau

From the booming and little-known days of the French Merchant Navy in the 1950s and 60s, stories of Breton seamen and their families have come down to us. They tell us of lives that were organised in a singular way due to the men’s absence. These are fragments of tales from a time that is now falling into oblivion. The film gives voice to the memories of the last merchant seamen using never-seen archive material, mostly filmed by amateurs. They describe life at sea and on land and are the testimonies not only of those who sailed off for six to ten months “to the other side of the waters”, but also of their wives and children. We discover simple, courageous lives that are both familiar and strange to our times and which are now left to us as a legacy.