Luc Decaster

Luc Decaster grew up in Saint-Nazaire, the “French ship-building capital”. During his teenage years while he was preparing for his Industrial Boilermaker’s Certificate, he was marked by fierce strikes, the confrontations between laborers from the Atlantic shipyards and the riot police. Having become an industrial draftsman with Chausson in the Paris region, he discovered the Taylorism of the press shops from behind the wall of the research department: the calloused hands and gaunt faces of the skilled workers on the assembly line. At the same time, he began studying history, and focusing on research into the labor movement. Then he became a history teacher. He went back to school to study film. In 1991, he stopped teaching and made his first films around Argenteuil, where he lives: films that evoked, without compassion, snippets of the lives of the people near to him. Those forgotten by history.