LE TERRAIN

What is a “place of your own”, a home? Surprisingly, it could at the very least be a “plot of land”, a cadastral term that confines a barely tolerated community to non-residence on urban outskirts (here near Saint-Denis in the Paris region). For one year, Bijan Anquetil filmed a group of Roma who settled on one such plot before being “displaced” to a neighbouring town. He offers here the daytime counterpart to his film, La Nuit remue, which explored the migrant fringes of society. Whereas the Afghans were made intentionally invisible in the latter film, here, the fact of inhabiting in the full sense materialises in the all-encompassing field of vision (which coincides with the plot): the families gradually fill the frame, set the scene and put in motion a social temporality. From the first shots, where the men are rummaging through a rubbish dump for building materials, to the interior shots of the women’s secrets, the film becomes the only, and indispensable, witness to the forming of a collective yet private space, which so resembles a lasting home that the speed of its construction and the inevitable brevity of its existence leave us in awe. (Charlotte Garson)