Sail

Saint-Nazaire, the shipyards. Tiny little men on gigantic machines, boats that will sail away: between the workers' every day life, the sailors' experience and the dream of seeing the world, how can imagination still have a place in an industrial world?

Four motifs of an insular landscape: dunes, grass, stormy skies, sea. These motifs are inflected and intertwined through various photochemical operations: successive printing generations, flat printing, bipacking, and chemical toning; unsettling the steady, desolate shots to create an imaginary landscape where elements and matter meet.

In the open intimacy of public gardens, men and women talk about their stories of love and sex, helping draw a cartography of what one can reveal about one's way of loving, of the norms, and of the taboos that limit speech.

At the end of the Middle Ages, in Florence, Italy, a revolt of the poorest textile workers, the Ciompi, upsets the city and succeeds in overthrowing the government. In Florence, I film in their footsteps to bring out the ghosts of this revolt. In the industrial suburbs, I discover the echoes in the present, in the modern textile factories where immigrant workers are exploited. In Paris, I dialogue with the militant researcher who made the history of the revolt. Together we question the political stakes of writing history in the construction of a fertile collective memory.