Synopsis

The D22 is a small, isolated road in eastern France, with a succession of small, almost deserted villages, a town of two thousand inhabitants and fields as far as the eye can see, whose soil seems to have been worked to exhaustion. The population is predominantly elderly, the feeling of the war that raged several times is still very present, the economy is almost dead and something ghostly emanates from the lives of the inhabitants.  This is the road where all my ancestors lived, and which I was the first to leave. At the time, I was full of anger, ashamed to have been born so far away from everything, and I forced myself to forget the childhood I had lived there. 

In 2015, my father died in a work accident in which he was thrown onto the asphalt of this very road and died there. He was a municipal employee and was hit by a truck while hanging Christmas lights at a crossroads. It upset me. I'm brooding over this tragedy all the more because a few days before his death, I came to visit my father and took a few photos of the town and the surrounding area. They were rather sad pictures, showing the decay of the town and its impoverishment. Towards the end of the film, I lingered on the exact spot where the accident was about to take place, before finishing with a portrait of my father, a very ordinary image, but one that was to become the last image of him and the only one I made of him in my life. And so, on the contact sheet, the place of his forthcoming death and the last image of my father follow each other. 

And I return once again, to the place I fled from, but to which I've returned again and again in search of childhood memories and roots. I return for a journey into my genealogy and its reservoir of grief, but also to try to complete a kind of reconciliation.

Produced by
Les Films de l’œil sauvage (France)

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With the support of

La SCAM - Bourse Brouillon d'un Rêve

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