BOIS D’ARCY

“This strange country is not foreign to me”: of the suburb where he spent part of his childhood, Mehdi Benallal remembers the straightness of the streets, whose toponymy – echoing the presence of the French Film Archives at Bois d’Arcy – unconvincingly carry the names of Chaplin, Tati, Lang or Von Stroheim. As he says in a voice-over tinged with a cold anger, he had not been aware that Bois d’Arcy also hosted one of France’s largest prisons but had somehow sensed it: in an area filmed as a sterile place, where only the sky offers an opening, this son of an Algerian had to put up with commonplace racism whose discreet signs still mark the walls and street furniture. Beyond the factual aridity of this urban inventory and the filmmaker’s painfully personal counterpoint, a singular image of the past emerges: the silhouette of the father who approaches his family from an enormous distance and stares at them without so much as a greeting. The collapse of a familiar figure almost devoured by the background, as if the threatening fixity of the film shots were an inherent part of this petrified landscape. (Charlotte Garson)