Foucault Against Himself

The metamorphosis of a young boy from a sub-proletarian background in Picardy into a star of French cultural life. Édouard Louis, who in a few years has become the spokesman writer of a generation, encourages each of us to make permanent transformation a new way of life.

Throughout the colonial period, military doctors accompanied France's colonial army. On the one hand, they served their troops, but on the other hand, they also helped the local population. They saw themselves as humanitarians who helped treat and contain epidemics. The dark side of their mission is also highlighted.

At a time of debates on gender, identity, belonging and borders, a man has sought to overcome the strict opposition between oneself and others, to dream that we can transport ourselves, modify ourselves, transform ourselves. This is the writer Édouard Louis.

A film-maker travels through mountain villages and along the shores of Alpine lakes to investigate the disappearance of Valérie 20 years earlier. She allegedly murdered a Canadian tourist before disappearing without a trace. At least that is how the narrator, who was passing through the region at the time, remembers the story. Over the course of the interviews, the elusive Valérie seems to disappear a second time, literally engulfed by the Alpine landscape, magnificently captured on film by François Caillat. A haunting, imposing landscape, where chasms and precipices become metaphors, characters in a work of fiction that the camera turns into a documentary. A film in the form of an essay in which the director takes his work on memory to its highest degree of abstraction.

Over a century, the saga of a Lorraine lineage of wood industrialists. Rise and fall, through the vicissitudes of a province torn between its French identity and its annexation to Germany.