Ne quittes pas ton pays, Do Not Leave Your Homeland

Augustine lives in social housing in the south of Martinique island. Her weeks are marked by visits from her care assistant, phone calls to her family in Europe and funeral notices on the radio. As part of the BUMIDOM migration programme, she left Martinique in 1964 and decided to return in 2004. At home, the volume of the TV attempts to hide her solitude. A few metres away, a group of neighbours try to kill time by repairing their motorbikes, chatting in the parking lot and going on outings in town. Finally, 6,800 km away, in the Paris region, a group of young friends do what they can to stay close to their Caribbean origins.

In 1963, Michel Debré set up the Office for the Development of Migration in the Overseas Departments in order to bring people from the West Indies and La Réunion to “mainland France”. A propaganda tool that is little known today, this programme had a triple function: to curb the unemployment rate, to control the demographic level of the overseas departments and to curb the desire for independence in a climate that was very propitious for independence at the time. Ne quittes pas ton pays is a feature documentary that will be shot both in Martinique and in the Paris region. In particular, I want to explore the question of BUMIDOM and its legacy in the present by focusing on different characters: my grandmother, Augustine; her neighbours, a group of men in their thirties and forties who wander in the parking lot of the housing estate; and a group of young people of West Indian origin from the Paris suburbs. Augustine’s home, the council estate parking lot and the Paris periphery will be the spaces in which the chosen characters will evolve: their different testimonies will echo and contradict each other and reflect the plurality of voices and trajectories of BUMIDOM.