The Seeds we sow

Nathan Nicholovitch likes to hold his ambitions regarding fiction up against the constraints of a reality that tends to elude it. After the suburbs of Phnom Penh, haunted by the Khmer Rouge genocide (Avant l’aurore, 2015), this time he set the scene in a high school in suburban Paris, fighting against Parcoursup, the higher education admission platform, and against the reforms of Minister Blanquer. While he was invited to host a film workshop for eleventh graders, seeing how some of them were involved in the conflict, the director used this opportunity to turn fictional storytelling into a driving force to intensify the present and disclose the emotional and political truth of the situation. The method is simple enough: he pushed reality a little bit further, by inventing the fictional character of a high-school female student who, just like her real classmates, has spent several hours in custody for writing a tag against Macron, but who ultimately died. Les Graines que l’on sème is a film about mourning and anger, in which the wrath of a generation finds tragic gravity in the tone of bereavement, held throughout the film, alongside the work of pain. Chiara is dead, she does not have a face nor a voice: she is but a name, an outlook on her own world – which is filmed eagerly – and an absence. The film winds around this void the voices and faces of the living, in a spiral, together with their words which recall and mourn the departed. The spirit of age-old tragedy flies over those faces and swirls those words. Yet the filmmaker is driven by the most urgent questions. For instance: what is the purpose of school, and what is a high-school student? When it is a French teacher’s turn to speak to Chiara’s classmates, she conjures up the words of other deceased persons: La Fontaine, Hugo, Char, Kant. Talking to the dead, listening to them is a way to wrest legacy and its transmission from identity-driven discourse, to replace it in the tradition of social struggles, and to restore its revolutionary power. A beautiful and fiery programme indeed for a French fiction. (C.N.)