"Les Flamboyantes" by Laetitia Tura, at the Douarnenez Film Festival
Laetitia Tura, director of the film "Les Flamboyantes", here in August 2021 at the Douarnenez Film Festival.
© Olivier Favier / RFI
Text by: Olivier Favier Follow
7 mins
Photographer, Laetitia Tura was the youngest member of the Bar Floréal collective.
His long-term works focus on exile, memory and oblivion.
Today, she is extending this research with a second feature-length documentary dedicated to three young girls whose families have experienced immigration.
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After a few years spent at Inalco learning literary Arabic, Laetitia Tura first explored the north of Morocco.
With Hélène Crouzillat, she largely shot
Les Messagers
, released in 2014, which gives a voice and a face to a few young people who left West Africa in the hope of a better life.
Seven years later, his new opus brings us back to the Parisian suburbs, with Anaïde, Betsy and Grace, who are now between 19 and 22 years old.
The first two followed with her during the year 2016-2017 a workshop in a college of La Courneuve in Seine-Saint-Denis, around objects that convey memory.
It was called
They
Leave
Me Exile
.
Truncated genealogies
Grace, for her part, attended a screening of the
Messengers
.
During the debate that followed, his speech clearly expressed the link between the film presented and the new project: “
Our parents came to give birth to us here and nothing is known about their lives.
Listening to him, Laetitia Tura felt the immediate urge to include him in her film:
“
She was able to verbalize her inability to tell the story of her parents, and the fog in which she had grown up.
"But her ability to name the lack also questions the director about the risks of her project:"
Until the end I was afraid of the parents' eyes, because the words could seem harsh.
But his mother validated.
"
The mothers are there, always, and they speak in turn.
Their fight, on which they were silent for a long time, takes shape and color: “
Rajani, Betsy's mother, came from Sri Lanka.
She said no a lot of times and paid for the breakups she made.
"
And Laetitia Tura reveals in the filial bond an impalpable transmission: “
The girls have confidence in themselves and in their life.
They inherited the initial impulse from their parents.
They inherit this strength unconsciously.
"
Stories that are also told in the silences, the clumsiness
The families we discover, to be often single parents, are structured and loving.
“
We made family trees.
On the paternal side, the three daughters had great voids.
At the very beginning of the film, Anaïde presents a collection of baby bottles which have been passed down for several generations from mother to eldest daughter.
This intimate, family memory is what the young woman manages to put into words.
Historical memory, its “great men”, is almost modeled - the colonization of Haiti, slavery, the revolt - but proper names and dates are absent.
And it is the director who intervenes to recall them.
If in the film we never see her, we hear her words, her first name in the mouths of her interlocutors, so many signs of the bond that has been woven between her and the young girls.
If their speech is hesitant, in substance as in form, this is how it will be presented, without false pretense, because this bumped, clumsy language, which so often seems to miss its target, tells a different story. .
Social segregation accepted, but for how long
?
“
They are not angry,”
notes Laetitia Tura, “
they have accepted reality as it is.
They do not yet perceive social segregation because they are not confronted with social differentiation.
"
The awareness of sexism and racism is present, formulated and it leads to a denunciation, but the barrier that separates them from Paris and the inner suburbs is never questioned.
It is the world of work, of which Grace perceived all the violence between the first scenes and the end of the shooting, which will undoubtedly make it possible to formulate its injustice.
“
It's not just a story of words, it's also a story of experience,
” explains Laetitia Tura, but ambitions leave little room for dreams.
"
I chose the happy medium,
" says Anaïde to describe the studies she is destined for.
"
A 15 on my bulletin in the 93 can be worth a 10 in Paris,
" she explains for her post-baccalaureate orientation choices.
In five or ten years, what will happen to what sounds like terrible resignation today?
►
First screenings in France at the Douarnenez Festival (from August 21 to 28, 2021), then in Paris, at the National Museum of Immigration, on November 3.
See also the film's page on the director's website.
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