La Ligne bleue, The Blue Line

I’ve made around ten feature films in the East. One character would lead me a few kilometres further to the next film, like a thread of Ariadne. I devoted three films to Nicolas’s young mother, Sabrina, and to her sister, Belinda. In one scene in Belinda, their father Franz tells the story of how his parents met in the Schirmeck camp, where the family—Yenish—had been interned. They were eleven and fifteen at the time, managed to escape, fell in love, had eight children and great-grandchildren. While filming my previous film, Loin de vous j’ai grandi, Nicolas, then thirteen, had been placed in a care home in Schirmeck—by force of fate—just a few hundred metres from the camp where his great-grandparents had met as children. So I decided to devote a film to that camp, whose presence still haunts the region and the memories of the last witnesses and their descendants. The question of deportation had already surfaced, often indirectly, in many of my films—without me intentionally seeking it out. It seemed more than necessary to pay tribute to those whose martyrdom had already been evoked in earlier films, and to all the others.

Direct witnesses are rare and very elderly, but their so-called “old” memory is vivid. The children of the victims carry the memories of their parents, mingled with their own imagination. They are growing older too. There was great urgency in recording them.

I didn’t want to make a historical film, but rather to try to embody history, to bring it to us through the prism of the memories of those who lived it—inevitably subjective. That subjectivity, with its sometimes exaggerated focus on one detail around which memory crystallises, an image, became the thread of the narrative—with visions so vivid and present that they are described as if they happened yesterday.

It asserted itself very early on. As I wandered through the valley and its villages, the landscape was striking: at 800 metres above sea level, a dazzling view. Three peaceful villages, a few hundred inhabitants who’ve lived there all their lives—Catholics in one, Protestants in another, and Anabaptists. Something between the beginning of the world and its representation on a miniature scale, landscapes from certain coming-of-age novels, with the idea that one must cross a mountain pass to glimpse a bit of the wider world. The beauty of the world and the barbarity of humankind. I decided to film each person quite literally in their own frame, in which they are fully embedded. Often these people have never left the house or street where they were born. The view they see each day hasn’t changed. From their windows, they still seem to feel the horror of those columns of deportees marching past, the SS, the dogs swirling around. Orders still echo in their ears. The deadly stench of the smoke rising from the camp is still perceptible to them. So I chose to film this story through their gaze—quite literally, through their windows, their lace curtains. Also in places where events really took place, and that have hardly changed.

You have to imagine that this region was annexed. The Nazis lived among the population, staying in local homes and requisitioning rooms. The camp where they went to “work” was only a few metres away. Young Wolfgang and Hildegarde, for example, children of one of the camp commanders, went to the same school as the mother of one of the film’s protagonists. The little girl would go to the commander’s home for afternoon snacks—he would subtly question her about the possible hiding place of her older brother, a deserter.

Indeed, the granite quarry just below the camp is a fundamental scenographic space. The presence of pink granite had attracted the Nazis, eager to use it in the construction of their grandiose monuments. The deportees were worked to death there—all while ensuring productivity, of course. It was also a place where the civilian population had some, albeit forbidden, contact with the deportees. And it is now an archaeological site, where Juliette Brangé conducts excavations in close collaboration with Michaël Landolt, the camp’s director, who is himself the grandson of a Struthof deportee. The aim is to document the quarry in the same way we document antiquity. By unearthing and preserving the objects—however mundane (screws, swabs)—we collect hard evidence of the camp’s existence for future generations, in opposition to any potential Holocaust deniers. What is striking and deeply moving about this quarry, left untouched until now, is the lingering memory, the trace of all those men’s existence—which, in a way, still imposes itself on and permeates the place.

The idea was to follow the flow of vivid memories, the comings and goings of recollection, what we recount of it, the objects we find and pass on, which speak for all the others and carry the narrative forward in very tangible ways. The idea of the box and the letters arose during filming and continued to evolve in editing. The structure was built up like concentric circles, drawing ever closer to the heart of things.

That’s how I’ve shot all my films—operating the camera myself, never changing the lens: I use the one that most faithfully reproduces human vision. That means I have to move forward or back, depending on whether I want a close-up or wide shot. I walk backwards for long stretches to follow people walking, to follow their trains of thought. My presence is not discreet. I’m always accompanied by a sound engineer. The idea is to make the filming apparatus clearly visible—conceived as a kind of fictional space in which truth or authenticity may ideally emerge. It’s at that distance that I establish my cinematic position—and try to create a space that feels, I hope, right for the viewer.

Part of my aim was to raise awareness of this little-known camp in France—one that held Nacht und Nebel detainees (resistance fighters, often very young, deeply opposed to Nazi ideology), as well as Jews and Roma people. I also wanted to offer another perspective—that of the local residents, seen from the reverse angle, who found themselves literally caught up in the chaos and who sometimes displayed exceptional moral rectitude and dignity. I hope this allows us to identify with them, to ask ourselves: what would I have done? To feel, too, a little of the prisoners’ suffering—to bear, in a way, a portion of their burden, and to share it. What struck me most was how these people stand, and stood, upright. Their courage, their dignity, and their modesty.