Des bobines et des hommes

In 2014, the Bel Maille factory in Roanne was used as a set for the feature La Fille du patron, about a company threatened with closure. Soon reality catches up with fiction. Its fifty-six employees wait anxiously but lucidly for a take-over or liquidation.

At the Bel Maille textile factory in Roanne, which served as the set for La Fille du patron – a social comedy about an ailing firm – reality catches up with fiction. The company is placed in receivership and its director meets potential buyers. He plies them, and everyone else, with the same discourse – a mantra: “Make sure the know-how remains anchored in its local roots”… For six months, Charlotte Pouch films the meetings and above all the shop floor with its splendid and elaborate machines whose multi-coloured reels have made innovative knitted fabrics. She captures a place full of life bathed in a family atmosphere, as some of the workers have spent their entire working life at Bel Maille. As the legal drama plays out, she records in image and sound an increasingly obvious drop-off in production: reels and people reduce pace until the waiting becomes unbearable, the super-secretary resigns herself to reading for want of orders to process, the potential buyer proposes a vague plan… Beyond the double allusion to textile and film “reels”, the title echoes John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men: the quality of the exchanges and the way the place is filmed reveal a deep admiration for the lucid and combative humanity of this group of people. The filmmaker took as her viaticum a quote from Simone Weil’s La Condition ouvrière: “Now, this is how I feel about the social question: a factory must be… a place where one makes a hard and painful, but nonetheless joyful, contact with real life”. (Charlotte Garson)