“La Traversée”, “Candyman”, “On the way to the billion”… The films on display

MORNING LIST

Plethora of recommendable films showing this week. A central idea runs through them for the most part: how to transmit the worst violence in history, of racism, of war, of the marital home, without betraying them but by putting the forms?

“On the way to the billion”: in Congo, a march of the disabled forms a body politic

Between June 5 and 10, 2000, an unrecognized conflict took place called the “six-day war”, where the Ugandan and Rwandan armies fought on neighboring land, that of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, then in the midst of civil war, and more precisely in the city of Kisangani, which was their meeting point. Particularly intense and violent, the clash caused many victims among Congolese civilians (nearly 1,200 dead and 3,000 wounded, according to a United Nations report).

In 2018, when Dieudo Hamadi began filming members of the Association of Victims of the Six Day War, women and men who bear physical stigmata in the form of mutilations, they have been waiting for thirteen years. compensation provided for by the judgment of the International Court (the famous “billion”).

This political constitution is the subject ofOn the way to the billion, taking the form of a long journey: the one that the disabled people decide to make across the whole country to the capital Kinshasa, to have their rights recognized. This parade of cripples with baroque accents, Dieudo Hamadi films it as the elaboration of a collective body which provides for the individual mutilations, arms and legs which are lacking. Ragged though it may be, the constituted body moves forward and holds on: from its bruised flesh gradually emerges tangible proof of a political existence. Mathieu macheret

“La Traversée”: how to portray misfortune to children?

Can a film aimed at children tackle serious topics without resorting to watering down or simplification that might betray them?

First feature film by host Florence Miailhe (César for best short film in 2002 for On the first Sunday in August), Crossing brings to this paradox a brilliant answer, by translating into the figurative language of the tale certain realities, often terrible, of our contemporary world.

Starting from her own family history, her ancestors having fled the pogroms and experienced exile, the director, with the help of her co-scriptwriter Marie Desplechin, links the Jewish experience of the 20th century.^e century to the news of population displacements, through the picaresque story of two orphans transported by circumstances.

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