La Quatrième génération

The Fourth Generation tells the story of my family – a Moselle family that had been in the wood trade since 1870 and which fell into decline a century later. This family history also provides the backdrop for a film about a region’s identity – Lorraine, annexed by Germany several times and finally reconquered by France. I could have been a German tradesman; I am, in fact, French and hardly knew the family business before it collapsed. I knew nothing of this hundred-year-long history. I returned to Moselle to film the places from my childhood. I rummaged in old documents, I listened to everyone who had had a hand in the family business – my mother, my aunts, the forest guards and woodcutters, the few survivors… The memories of three wars gone by, memories of an age when everything seemed to be fixed in time, memories of three previous generations from which the secrets and mysteries about each of the members finally spring forth. They revealed to me the most fragile and most tangible dimension in a family’s history… the thread from which I come.