Le sel est libre, On the salt line

I was fortunate enough to be able to choose between several residency locations. I really wanted to go to Auvergne, it’s a territory that resembles the places where I grew up  and learnt film making. 

I was born in Lyon, my grandparents are from the Pilat region, I studied in Ardèche and I co-founded a film association in Dôme. I didn’t know Ambert nor Auvergne, but I immediately recognised the familiar landscapes. 

This residency was included in a broader programme in which young designers develop reflections on local economic, political and ecological issues. As a filmmaker, I wasn’t trying to “find solutions” but rather to take a step back, or a step to the side, and look for a story that could resonate with the life of this mountain and its inhabitants. I also wanted to convey a political message that would echo the forms of mutual aid and resourcefulness that characterise these places. 

During this film, I was lucky to meet Christel Gay, who takes care of the local communities’ material and immaterial heritage. She put me in contact with all the people who played in and collaborated on the making of this film. Thus, I met members of an association that has been exploring the mountains for over 50 years: the GRAHLF - Groupe de Recherches Archéologiques et Historiques du Livradois-Forez (Archaeological and Historical Research Group from Livradois-Forez).

I discovered the existence of these written reports whilst filming archaeological digs in the Forez mountains with members of  the GRAHLF.  These were the first images that were filmed, and they open the film. They then told me about the smuggling and showed me the geographical  limits  that split the summit of the mountain into two distinct zones of gabelle (the salt tax). Salt was inexpensive in Auvergne and heavily taxed in the Loire region, smuggling was therefore a means of survival for its inhabitants. The reports were written by “gabelous”, the salt police whose mission was to survey this internal border. Preserved at the departmental Archives of the Loire, they date back from the Ancien Régime. Jacques Verrier, an archéologist with the GRAHLF, as well as  Pia Rigaldiès, a friend who is a heritage curator and  paleographer, helped me decipher them. 

Reading a large number of these records gave me the idea for the film’s script, modeled on their simple frame: smugglers, arrest, popular rebellion. I found a work method during this film: starting from History through local micro-histories and finding out what they reveal about our contemporary world.

The Hautes-Chaumes are high grazing plateaus in the mountains, uninhabited in the winter, magical in their lack of infrastructure. I discovered these plateaus without being able to see further than 3 meters, it is a moon-like landscape that rapidly changes, many still get lost up there. What immediately struck me was the timeless and enigmatic quality of the landscape: one cannot tell if he is at 200m or 1500m above sea level, there are very few time markers, except a handful of fences, and distances seem short even though it can take hours to travel from one point to another. 

The members of the GRAHLF were the first to take an interest in the archeological history of this mountain. They are trying to understand the many past lives of these high pastures. I personally find it very beautiful that the earth beholds traces, mostly invisible, but that, when studied, unearth different ways of life, habits, and highly precise ideas about how these people once lived, as if reconstructing a story or a screenplay.

The smuggler represents, in this case, the resourcefulness of this community but also a figure of resistance to the regime in place. Transporting salt from one region to another was a necessity, salt was a necessity for animals, for preserving foods and for life. The salt smugglers also worked together and helped each other, they always travelled in groups. Due to their numbers they were sometimes able to stand up to the gabelous.

I quickly had the intuition that music and song could serve as a vector of narration. I wanted sung music that would dialogue with the story I wished to tell. I realised I needed to find a character who would embody the music. That is how the idea for Chantematin emerged, a kind of guide or external narrator who witnesses events unfolding before him.  

I met Éric Desgrugillers, a composer, ethnomusicologist and fund manager of the documentary collection at the AMTA (Agence des musiques des territoires d’Auvergne). We immediately wanted to work together to compose songs capable of generating their own imagery. Éric made all the music for the film, drawing inspiration from local occitan and auvergnat directories dating back to the Ancien Régime. We exchanged a lot, for example, it was Éric who found the film’s title Le sel est libre (Salt is free). It was also through these exchanges between musical and cinematic images that the structure of the film became clearer. 

At the same time, I met Alin Peillex, a local singer and activist. Alin embodies a contemporary troubadour. He sings in public and activist spaces, singing traditional music infused with political messages. We attempted to build his character together, he truly made the songs his own, and he still performs them to this day. 

My films are often made in collective settings, sometimes they are co-written, I am inspired by people to make my films. This project was produced with a limited budget and within an unusual timeframe: that of a year-long artistic residency. The encounters shape the film and enable it to adapt, to find solutions. All the actors and actresses were met during the making of the film. The cast consists entirely of non-professionals, inhabitants of Ambert and the surrounding  mountains.

I didn’t want to make a period film, we didn’t have the funds or the codes to do so. I wanted to play with these constant shifts back and forth, this persistent anachronism, as if to depict a story about a battle that still exists, as if the price of salt could just as easily be the price of fuel today. 

The idea was therefore to conceal clues throughout the film in order to amplify this ambiguity. The people filmed in the documentary sequences later became characters in the fictional scenes. We developed the roles together, as a continuity of their personalities, of their occupations. Together with costume designer Léa Bettenfeld, whom I also met at Ambert, we sought to blur this barrier further. I wanted large traditional auvernat hats for the smugglers. Initially, I imagined something closer to a period film. But whilst experimenting we realised that a Queschua backpack or a tracksuit produced a greater sense of strangeness and confusion, especially when paired with the large hats. In the end, whilst editing the film with Marie Da Costa, we quickly realised that the fictional narrative would not suffice on its own and that the documentary material (archeological excavations) was necessary for expressing the anachronism, the passing of time and the traces it leaves behind. We therefore decided to work with fade-outs, with dissolving images, using them as a guide to make all the material porous, allowing it to seep into and infuse the film over its entire duration.