La Place

“It was a rubbish dump. And now, we are there.” After the war, Colmar municipality allocated a piece of land at the foot of the Vosges to some gypsies. Some would say a campsite. The gypsies call it “La Place”. Faithful to her method of filming people as closely as possible–with the camera on her shoulder and a single lens–Marie Dumora enters the families’ daily life. Half sedentary, they live in well-kept trailers, except for their eldest member, Ramuncho, who has built himself a house that can be taken down and moved. Life in the open air makes for easy exchange in a community where everyone is busy making up for their lack of comfort. How to urinate without being seen, or to protect the children from passing trains, when there is no fence between them and La Place? But the chronicle of their daily life opens up an imaginary world far richer than a world of social documentary. Here, a small boy receives a horse for his 8th birthday. There, an old woman, imprisoned as a child in the Argelès Camp, recounts how she escaped a tidal wave in an epic spirit that restores full meaning to the term “travellers”. Shortly, however, La Place will be razed to the ground. When a young mother enters the apartment that replaces her trailer, the almost Rossellinian images of her first arrival are disturbing. Only then does one understand the accuracy of what Ramuncho says about the governments everywhere that are placing gypsies under house arrest: “They don’t want us to travel any more. You could say they’re jealous.”

Charlotte Garson