Le Dossier 332

Can you write your autobiography with someone else’s words? Recount a childhood using the discourse of social workers? Follow the growth of a body using receipts listed under the heading “Clothing”? Separated from her parents at birth, Noëlle Pujol reads off-screen a selection of letters from the child welfare service file that bears her name. To accompany the rigid bureaucratic language, she edits beautiful static shots filmed in the Ariège region, where she grew up. On a formal level, the achievement of Dossier 332 hinges on the struggle it builds up between bureaucratic distance and the persistent attachment to a place and to one’s siblings, despite separation. Not only does life rustle through these official letters – the film being a direct continuation of the work of Michel Foucault and Arlette Farge on older archives. But also, in the landscape shots, the direct sound reveals the texture and depth of space. The switching between the town and inhospitable mountains visually conveys the tension built up by the commentary between uprooting and rootedness. In the interstice between mineral and legal aridity, the pathos of a difficult childhood vanishes, opening the way for an original cinematographic form of writing.