Tu seras communiste, mon fils !

Between my father and I, there has always stood the Communist Party. Even as a babe, I was immersed in the world of political activism. At home, every discussion always ended up about politics. You might even say that being Communist is part of our family heritage. Now 80, my father, an old-timer in the French Communist Party, certainly wonders whether he has managed to hand down to me the values he has defended throughout his life. Of course, he hopes that I will carry on the flame, once I have grasped the importance of it all’ But as a 30-year-old, my commitments lie elsewhere and I have still not joined the Party, which doesn’t really reassure him. Yet, the family influence seemed quite alive when I began, one day, making a film on the changing face of the Communists in 2000. It was a letter that suddenly made my camera adopt another angle. A letter that my father had written to his father in 1969 announcing my birth. In a twist of fate, I found that their relationship had much in common with our own. This made me feel that our family was imperceptibly going to become more and more estranged. I had to do something, break with a kind of fatality in the family. But what could be done so that we could find ourselves, quite simply, together again ? (J.-C. Victor)