Le Reflet

“I wondered for a long time why my grandmother had never returned to her native country, Russia, why she had lived in the nostalgia of an abandoned land. Imprisoned in a camp in Germany, when the liberation came, she chose to follow the young French soldier she had fallen in love with.” It all began with a cracked black and white photo of a radiant face, that of a young woman smiling slightly at the camera. In every face there is a landscape. It took Jérôme Amimer years to leave in search of the Russian landscape hiding behind this face. A journey in time, into the images of village burnt by the Germans, in the memories that a niece has kept of her grandmother, a journey too into a daily life as different in its everyday gestures, as in its symbols. (Yann Lardeau)