CHECK CHECK POTO

Aubervilliers, the Mosaic center, well-named. This “welcoming structure” is open to
young persons from 12 to 17 years of age. They go there to chew the fat, to take a
nap, eat a snack or meet someone. “Check Check Poto”? An adolescent code
name, combining gesture and word, a tacit understanding of respect and distance,
that, precisely, for this first film by Julia Varga (a shorter version has already been
in circulation). Recording without hiding oneself, such is the target: to tap into the
remarkable stories of adolescence, here and now.
A theatrical space that the camera doesn’t leave, and where the sounds of the city
resonate off-camera, echoes of an outside that we understand is harsh. Nothing
spectacular, zero psychology, no typology, but time offered to words and to
situations to unfold beneath their angelic faces all their crumpled up belongings.
Patient work that reproduces the choice of long sequences in order to make place
for listening, to capture a gesture, between the wish to play grown-up and the signs
of an ever-present childhood. Portraits are drawn, lives are guessed, but decisive
here, with the fragility of that age of all desires, of all pressures, in this remarkable
moment where these still uncertain bodies are enrolled. We find of course stories
of boys and girls, school, fights, clans, but in all that is described in a subterranean
manner the relationship with oneself, with one’s image, with the law, with
disobedience, with language. (NF)