L’héroïque Lande. La frontière qui brûle

« An epic and primitive film, L’Héroïque Lande narrates the way half of this town, as it comes to birth and reaches full growth with close to 7 800 people living in it, will be destroyed in February 2016. The way 4 000 migrants deported from the South zone will be attempting to rise out of their own ashes in the North zone. Before the State decrees the clearing of the entire territory by October 2016, having close to 11 000 inhabitants scattered to all four corners of France. » This is how Nicolas Klotz and Élisabeth Perceval present their so-called « Jungle » project in Calais whose title and all it subsumes clearly speaks to its ambition, not to mention its measured extent, if sharing a true measure of all this is indeed possible. Now that’s exactly what it’s about: a bet on sharing, the challenge of testimony that might do justice to the difficulty, as well as to the complexity understood in the richest possible sense of the term, of this situation. Let no-one here be an « object » of this film; free everyone here from the constraints of frames or recordings; let each and everyone come and nourish images, instead; rekindle the circulation of speech; that all may rise up, against the abjection of denial of existence. What are these film-makers showing then? Not survival, or the miseries and submissions that come with it – all of which indeed weigh heavy upon the migrants, there’s no denying it. They are showing the affirmation of lives, of destinies, of strengths – hence, the desert land strangely turned into a land of heroes. And the way different kinds of music are integrated, even when they are chosen over the sound in. It is indeed less a matter of veracity than veridiction. In other words, not so much pretending to stick to the facts but having harmful agglutinations stripped away and making claims for a precarious yet powerful community. (JPR)