At the beginning of autumn, the slab of the Parc aux Lièvres in Evry, erected in the 1970s, is moving by its simplicity.

Gradually abandoned by its inhabitants relocated under an urban renewal operation which will lead to its total destruction in 2024, it bears the scars of the lives of families, up to 400, who have succeeded each other in its ten austere towers.

Only about twenty inhabitants still live there.

A few threadbare clothes persist at the windows, soon illegible inscriptions ("popular butcher's shop", "taxiphone") surmount the curtains taken from old shops.

The doors are gutted, the facades tagged;

the slab no longer has its proud look of the 80s and 90s.

Last summer, in a final burst of life, it hosted the filming of the film "Athena" and "swarmed" again, rejoiced Sébastien Le Roy, director of the Evry Sud neighborhood-social center.

The latest feature film by Romain Gavras, presented at the Venice festival and released on September 22 on Netflix, recounts the hostage taking of the eponymous city by its young inhabitants, ulcerated by the death of one of them, has a priori the victim of a police blunder.

Long sequence shots swirling in the corners of the city, firing of fireworks igniting the night, young people howling their anger in an almost animal way: the film overflows with violence.

The work is based on "a lot of clichés", severely judges one of its young inhabitants, Mohammed, 14 years old.

"It feels like being in a war movie, (…) it's surreal, it will never happen! (The director) adores violence" and conveys "a bad image" of the suburbs, denounces the schoolboy , "disappointed".

-"It's still a movie!"-

Magnetized by this slab "which he loved" for 14 years, Ibrahim Diakité comes to visit his former neighbors.

"My sons, aged 10, 15 and 17 grew up there" and "frankly, everything is fine" smiles the 48-year-old man with a small graying beard and a jovial face.

"Nobody wanted to leave," sighs this security guard.

A feeling shared by Toufik Soltani, 52, who moved a stone's throw away and who "will not change" neighborhood because he finds it "calm" and "nice".

Yildiz Eda holds his relocation "contract" in hand, after having lived there for eleven years.

The 23-year-old young woman recounts the "good atmosphere" of the slab "where everyone got on well", where "there were children everywhere, from the morning" and where "during Ramadan everyone ate outside ".

"Athena"?

the young woman shrugs her shoulders: "It's still a film, I don't care".

Romain Gavras and Dali Benssalah at The American French Film Festival (TAFF) in Hollywood, October 13, 2022 VALERIE MACON AFP

"The film is a farewell party to the neighborhood", welcomes for his part the mayor of Évry-Courcouronnes Stéphane Beaudet, "child of the city" who remembers "the happy hours of the slab but also his depression " .

He is full of praise for the production, which took residents and traders on an "incredible human adventure" which had "a real impact" for the city, with "4,500 stamps and nearly 3 million euros injected into the local economy".

The film is "a bit caricatural", recognizes the elected official who refuses angelism: "Let's not cast a modest veil over certain young people, certainly in the minority, but who exist".

In passing, he recalls that in November 2005, a workshop for making Molotov cocktails had been discovered under the premises of the municipal police, at the Parc aux Lièvres.

Faced with the universe of concrete, Sébastien Le Roy sums up the general feeling: "there is really something special" about this slab which has welcomed "the stories of people who have lived there for 40 years" and that "we don't cannot erase out of hand".

© 2022 AFP