Met by AFP in an editing room in Paris, the 53-year-old Haut-Savoyard, short hair and sneakers, takes a break in his tour of France to present this documentary released in mid-October which gives pride of place to home helpers or housekeepers.

"Chore firsts" whose social utility is inversely proportional, he says, to the way they are paid and considered.

"This film is important because these women, beyond listening to them, we see them: their work at home, how they carry bodies, how they wash the elderly", comments economist Rachel Silvera, about of trades usually "invisible".

Evoking people as closely as possible, without the filter of "experts", such is the Perret method.

As is also the Ruffin credo, the two men are in their second joint film, after "J'veux du Soleil" (2019), on yellow vests.

The deputy of La France insoumise (LFI), François Ruffin (C) and the director Gilles Perret arrive in a performance hall in Marseille where they present their film "J'veux du Soleil", March 2, 2019 GERARD JULIEN AFP

"We met on a roundabout," Gilles Perret recounts with relish.

It was in 2004, in Chamonix.

They were covering a demonstration by opponents of the return of trucks to the Mont-Blanc tunnel.

"That same night, Ruffin was sleeping at home. We always thought we would work together someday."

A native of Haute-Savoie, Perret drew practically all of his film subjects there.

Starting with the mountain, which he climbs, and his neighbors in Quincy, a hamlet of sixty souls where he still lives in the house of his childhood.

Strong attachment to the village

Father a mechanical worker, mother who died when he was nine years old, the young boy spent hours in the hamlet bistro held by his great-grandmother, between songs, fondues and belotes.

"I have a strong attachment to the village, the inhabitants took care of me. And since I do not subscribe at all to the neoliberal discourse on permanent mobility ..."

After an engineering degree in electronics, it is always close to home that he learns the tricks of filming and editing.

Without going to film school: two years as a conscientious objector on local television in Cluses.

And it is still near his home that he films a boss from the Arve valley confronted with relocation in "My globalization" (2006), then the mountain proletariat in "De Mémoires d'ouvriers" (2012) .

And that he devotes a triptych to resistance and post-war social conquests with "Walter, retour en resistance" (2009), "Happy Days" (2013) and "La Sociale" (2016).

A memory is close to his heart.

He claims to have invited Stéphane Hessel to give a speech at the Glières plateau, which was then at the origin of another text by the resistant, “Indignant yourself!”, A publishing phenomenon in 2010-2011.

"Deeply rooted in his region, Gilles Perret starts from the local to tell universal stories, and he does it very well", recalls Samuel Gontier, journalist from Télérama who wrote on documentaries until 2012. "And in a High -Savoie rather to the right, he does not hesitate to work in the face of adversity! "

A time in bickering with another Haut-Savoyard, the UMP Bernard Accoyer, the director assumes.

"I claim my subjectivity", he says, while refuting the term "engaged".

"From a bobo filmmaker who works with his bobo actor friends, do we say he is hired for bobos?"

"Ma mondialisation" was his first film to be released in theaters (only one, in Paris).

Fifteen years later, it is in the same factory in the Alps that Perret has just shot a fiction for which his partner Marion Grange is co-authoring the screenplay.

It tells the story of workers who, faced with a threat of relocation, will hijack the methods of finance to buy their factory.

Release planned for the end of 2022. With a program title: "Resumption in hand".

© 2021 AFP