De cendres et de braises

A waking city, presented in majestic black and white and equally sparse and elaborate percussion sounds. Les Mureaux is a banlieue west of Paris, built in the 1960s to house the people coming from Sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb as close as possible to the great Renault production facility in Flins-sur-Seine. At the time, the formerly state-owned car manufacturer’s hunger for labour was insatiable. You could, if not live well, at least work well here as a labourer. Later, in May 1968, Flins was the site of one of the longest-running factory occupations ever to take place in France. Today Les Mureaux is ruled by a strange synchronicity of traditions and breaks. Manon Ott and Grégory Cohen meet their protagonists, who exist as contemporary pragmatists, on equal terms, thus bringing out their individual vitality. And what an ear! Testimonies, stories, statements that want to be more than just information, want to be sound, or let’s say: life as lived. Their film creates a collective discourse on the critique of daily life, from the labour struggles of the past to the social insecurity of the modern slaves, unemployed and temporary workers, which is at the same time a condensed testimony on the European social and labour history of the past half-century.