Si tout le monde part, If everyone goes away

This film is also a portrait of a woman, though in a very different environment! I filmed my mother, who worked with families raising children with disabilities. During the lockdown, while spending time at her home, I became aware of the many institutional dysfunctions she was facing. A few years earlier, she had taken on a newly created position within the French public education system: a referent teacher. I grew up with a mother who deeply believed in her work as a teacher, and suddenly I saw her experiencing profound suffering at work. She, who had always devoted herself to others, was going through what felt like a faith crisis questioning the values that had shaped her as a teacher and, above all, the institution to which she had dedicated her life. When she told me she wanted to leave, at a time when France’s public services were facing an ever-deepening crisis, I realised I had the opportunity to document a unique turning point in her life, one that was both deeply personal and profoundly political.

Around my mother, there was this overwhelming feeling of an entire world, the school system she had always known, collapsing. Her work stood at the intersection of two sectors currently experiencing major crises, healthcare and education. The lack of resources and the crushing weight of bureaucracy are widely criticised. My aim was not to provide an overarching analysis of the situation, but rather to focus on one link in the chain, the daily life of a worker in distress, my mother, who had decided to leave and was now reflecting on everything she had experienced. Of course, I am fully aware that my mother was not the person suffering most within the system, especially since she was taking early retirement and therefore did not have to worry about what she was going to do next. That is also why filming her was possible, asking questions, and analysing events together. This also enabled me to access other realities. Through her portrait, I also wanted to reveal the challenges faced by many professionals in this field, as well as by families and their children.

The film alternates between situations in direct cinema and more constructed moments, such as our conversations and my mother’s readings from her texts. Very early on, I felt that pure observational scenes needed to be complemented by something else. I wanted the film’s journey to reflect my own need for understanding. I had witnessed my mother’s struggles, even fearing at times that she might not hold up, but I also discovered something even more delicate than I had expected: sometimes, my mother herself reproduced forms of institutional violence. It was precisely this sense of complicity with a system, and with decisions she fundamentally disagreed with, that led her to question her profession. Our conversations therefore became the film’s guiding thread. I wanted the audience to gradually perceive a coherent narrative emerging, the story of a human and professional experience through which we are also talking about our society.

The film fully adopts my mother’s point of view and never leaves it. Since I was filming alone, and because she was going through difficult situations, I naturally spoke to her.  Quite quickly, I realised that my position beside her - which I nevertheless wanted to keep discreet - created an interesting dynamic. My presence, both as filmmaker and as a daughter observing her mother, gradually became the film’s second point of view. At first I ask her questions, but eventually I allow myself to express my own opinions. The audience inevitably encounters my mother through my gaze. And that gaze changes over time, it evolves, complexifies and I realise that my mother is not the heroine I had imagined. My presence and my relationship with her were integral parts of the cinematic device I wanted to create. I liked her tone, the spontaneous way she spoke to me, trying to explain, as a teacher, as a mother, the workings of this complex system.

During her final year at work, my mother began writing as a way of coping with what she was experiencing. But it was only during the editing process, when I filmed additional interviews with her, that she told me she had continued writing after leaving her job. It immediately became clear to me that these texts had to become part of the film. They bring a more universal dimension, precisely because they are so intimate, but also a political one. Her words deepen our understanding of her relationship to her work, especially her feeling of not always being able to agree with what she was doing. Writing allows her to restore meaning when everything seems to have lost it, or, to borrow Cynthia Fleury’s expression, to “make reality inhabitable”. 

I filmed entirely on my own, at first, this was due to practical constraints - I didn’t have the time or the resources to find someone to work with - but very quickly, it became obvious that this was the right approach: I needed to be alone with my mother, face to face. Canadian artist and cinematographer Léna Mill-Reuillard, with whom I had worked on Caiti Blues, advised me remotely throughout the shoot, commenting on the images as they accumulated. The same locations recur throughout the film: her office, her sofa… I liked the frame of the windows behind her and the changing light, which makes the passing of time tangible within each shot. I wanted to emphasize the gentleness of the space of the home, contrasting it with the institutional spaces, with their artificial lighting and impersonal furniture. The architecture and urban design also reveal the mechanical, repetitive nature of the institutional machine. As well as its failures and dead ends.

Initially, I imagined retracing my mother’s final year at work in chronological order, from September until her departure the following summer. Although the film still follows that overall progression, the chronology is interrupted by interviews I filmed after the shooting had ended. When editor Marie Beaune and I watched these interviews together, we immediately felt they needed to become part of the film. Their inclusion reshaped the structure quite a lot because the editing progress was already well advanced. The construction therefore happened in two distinct stages. The workplace scenes became more fragmented sequences almost like scattered memories, held together by my mother’s direct address to the camera and her readings from her notebooks.

I always write my film projects while listening to one or several pieces of music. For this film, I had two references in mind: Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass and Simple Man by Klaus Nomi. These choices are very intuitive, they help me imagine the rhythm and tone of the film. When I became more familiar with Carla Pallone’s work, whom I initially knew through the duo she formed with Rebeka Warrior in Mansfield. TYA, I immediately knew I wanted to collaborate with her. She introduced me to Meredith Monk’s work in concert, and we talked extensively about “hocket” singing and about the place music, which I imagined as slightly wild, could occupy within the film. Carla loves building her compositions from the sounds of reality itself, drawing inspiration from existing sonic material. She has an extraordinary ear and an incredible gift for transforming tiny details into music, in this case, it was the administrative jargon, the acronyms, and the sounds of computer keyboards! 

Indeed, the title suggests this idea: if everyone leaves? And it suggests that this could very well happen under today’s working conditions. I hope the film makes it clear that people do not leave because they lack commitment, interest, or motivation, but because of a much more complex combination of intimate, ethical, and political reasons that eventually make their situation unbearable. I wanted the film to convey that complexity by showing how my mother is caught between contradictory demands: wanting to help, while having only “official” solutions at her disposal, solutions she knows are not sufficient, often ill-suited, and sometimes even absurd and disconnected from realities on the ground. I believe her experience can resonate with many people because, ultimately, it raises a broader question: what is the right place to occupy, and how should we position ourselves within a system that we know is harmful?