Jaurès

“And there, where’s that?” For a visiting female friend, Vincent Dieutre talks about the images he filmed over one year from the flat of his lover, Simon. The story of a now finished love is layered over by a totally different scenario: the precarious existence of young Afghan refugees camping out in the cold on the banks of the Saint-Martin canal. Intimacy and society, high and low, the intimate sounds of the couple and long shots of the group: everything seems to disassociate sound and image, and yet the filmmaker’s emotional memory connects them up. Is it a coincidence that Simon was a volunteer in an association helping asylum seekers? That the flat is near the metro station, Jaurès – the MP who criticised “rogue laws”? That the filmmaker himself was undercover in Simon’s life? By working on the sound and the actual substance of the image (discreet use of animation), Dieutre goes beyond the inherent superiority of the view from the window to relate the intimate birth of compassion.