Notes for les Sanglières

In the 16th century, in a forest in the Cévennes in France, peasant women from many regions band together to fight the enclosure of common lands. A few centuries later, construction in the forest is under the watchful eye of Annie, a solitary 75-year-old night watchwoman. One night, the landscape is turned upside down.

The first attempts to map the Mississippi Delta date back to the early 18th century. An uncontrollable, fragile and shifting environment in itself, it has since been constantly transformed by the exploitation of its resources. Navigating between times and spaces, the real and the speculative, Sweat gradually immerses us between the lines of the maps, in the fluctuating and insubordinate part of this territory, by following the living beings that inhabit it.

300 million years ago, the north of France was a wetland. 140 years ago, a canal is dug and never filled with water. One day, vagabonds decide to go down an invisible river and pick on the way débris of a world to start a new one. The film finds its starting point in the 1970s environmental scandal of Love Canal (NY, USA) who led to the Superfund act (1986), the first federal program on damages caused to natural ressources by industrial sites. From there, the film traces a path through the post-industrial landscapes of north of France and questions, through fiction, the taking in hand (metaphorically and litterally) of those great landscapes.

A sea of dunes. An unpopulated seaside resort. Hands putting together a heap of documents. The landscape is an architecture.

Commissioned for the CinéHaïku 2018 festival exhibition in Gordes.

A short film by Elsa Brès.

All together, the students take control of the classroom and build a barricade. Made from everyday school materials, this construction symbolizes both the struggles that run through our history and collective power, to organize, to act and to think about the future.