He is thirty years old. They are twenty-five years old.
They decide to trace their family history. As a search, a search for identity, they leave in search of their roots.
A journalistic team prepared the work. By means of bits of family films, yellowed photos, archives of current events, the team reconstituted 70 years of history of their family in 70 years of history of France, of the world. The young people are going to find the witnesses of the journey of their family. They go on the road, cover thousands of kilometres. They are on the scenes of the past of their parents, they question to find out and understand. Finally at the end of the road and time, the present, their own childhood, their adolescence, and their own choices.
Result: a road-movie. They make a pre-editing. Then they call their family and, alone together with their father, their mother, their grandmother or their grandfather, they screen these images to confront their parents with their own story. They question them: "Explain to me".
Every film is the ship's log of this collection, told in the first person.
Two films, two families.
One, the very French. Grandfather colonel, serviceman from 1938 till 1964, from the Resistance to the war of Algeria, father participant in the student and workers' protest movement of May 1968, a design teacher, from the PCF (French Communist Party) to the Green party, and Benjamin, 30 years old today, an independent photographer, who will become a dad during the film.
The other one, Arab. A Kabyle grandmother married to the future executive of the FLN during the war of Algeria in Paris, 13 children of whom a leftist teacher. Who decides to return to live in Algeria in 1979 and an employee married to a French born. Both have a girl, born in 1981: Kahina who grows up in Algeria, Katia who grows up in the Essonne. Condemned to death by the GIA in 1991, the family of Kahina returns to France. Both cousins together lead a search, on both sides of the Mediterranean Sea.
NOTE FROM THE PRODUCER, CHRISTOPHE NICK
How to explain why we live together? How to tell the story of the 20th century to those who did not live it? How to know what we pass on to other generations?
But finally: what are the factors that allow each of us to build a sustainable life in this world of chaos? Between idealism and realism, between values and compromise, between break ups and resignation, how do we make the choice?
We worked for months with the team at Canal + to finalize this collection; ROOTS. If nothing else, we gained a sense of a growing "double-emergency":
- Those under 30 years old have to understand that they are not "the worse-off" generation, more "sacrificing" than the previous ones.
- They have to know and feel that they are the fruit of labours lost from decades of contradictions and tragedies, enthusiasms, wars and commitments.
Let us call that generation the "new adults". It is the first generation from the children of May ‘68. Their parents were 20 years old in the time of barricades, occupations in factories and the general de Gaulle, Woodstock and the collective utopia. Their grandparents had 20 years during the Second World War, the period of the Resistance or the collaboration, the genocide and the Liberation, then colonial wars and the Cold war. The generation of the years 1960-70 would have known a golden age and would have been privileged had they experienced modern times.
The years 1940-50 would have been lost, between collaboration and shameful decolonization. A vision of our history that only faintly follows the actual experiences of those who crossed involved is left.
Nevertheless, between the fatalities and radical criticisms, the "new adults" are not either in the conflict of generation, or in the acceptance of their inheritance. There is tenderness towards grandparents and love for parents.
However, there is a big problem: the feeling of being bound by an underlying pact or promise that forges the collective identity between the generations has been lost. Questioning points of reference and their diffusion becomes central.
This is how we managed to choose two families. They represent only themselves, and have not been used as examples, they just happened to have crossed the barriers of the century. Each member of these families made a choice, at crucial moments of a world in madness.
We suggested to the descendants of these families to travel with us on the road to find witnesses who knew their relatives -their ancestors- at these crucial moments. We observed them, questioning, curious, sensitive to their situation, admirable. They discovered the stages of the lives of their families, the secrets and the prides, the taboos and the happiness.
We were stunned to see that by learning about the previous generations, we gained mirror images of our own lives, our own roots awakened and no longer buried.
These two peculiar stories made us feel a dazed sense of humility. They prove to us that our collective identity is made of a thousand roots, but also that our ancestry has stemmed from violence, from passions, from love and from enthusiasm. It is the most fascinating of affairs: the discovery of one’s roots and those of others, obliges one to open to and accept the diversity of views on the same event, to understand the extraordinary wealth of links which unite us.
To dig up our roots is to understand and know better. It is to begin to be at peace with our history. It is to meet with the opinions of people. This is the ultimate question.
INTENTION NOTE OF THE DIRECTORS
PATRICIA BODET AND JEAN-DENIS ROBERT
Benjamin, Kahina and Katia rake up the past better to question him. The combined history of their family is cut into twenty precise periods of distinct choices corresponding to places, periods and situations where the history of the world and that of the family become intertwined. These choices had heavy consequences on the family life: marriage, travel, profession, break-ups, commitment… The attitude presents a method to voice the current events stemming from the family history.
These choices were made in the context of a period and in the places revisited by the young people: a battlefield, a former clandestine café, a village, a house, a school, a workshop, and a street.
Archives describe each period. Then every young person goes on the spot and meets a key witness from the family story. They try to understand what took place and why their parents made certain decisions. The family archives help them to relive the moment in question.
End to end, all these images formed a programme that the young people presented to their parents and grandparents. An opportunity for us to seize a moment of honesty, the young people then dared to ask the most searching questions about the commitments of their families.
All these materials aided the making of the films. We were left with the strange feeling that these "road movies" set in the 20th century, had at every stage somehow echoed our own lives.
Roots
"The Géminel family "
Broadcasted on June 5th, 2007 by Canal +
ABSTRACT
The Géminel family is a French family represented by three generations. Benjamin has a comprehensive glance on Maurice, his grandfather a resistant and military grandfather, and his father Patrick, artist and activist.
SUMMARY
The moral of this first film lies in the heart of two lives crossed by feelings of regret ant defeat. The father and grandfather, Patrick and Maurice, were brutally separated with their family at graduation age. In the name of strong values they both work hard to overcome their differences.
Each in his own way is a rebel man: the one, exemplary soldier and heroic resistant, is going to fight to the end for his vision of France. At the putsch of 1961 when the war with Algeria is lost, he soon leaves the army after with a disenchanted glance. The other man, a recognized artist, generous activist and respected professor, has put his heart and soul into the life of his community. But then his friends fall, under the bullets of an insane killer.
The son and grandson, Benjamin, moves them both. His identical quest allows him to discover the intimate dramas of his ancestors. The fact that he can still have his own dreams proves that the spirit of the rebel man continues generation after generation.
THE MAIN EVENTS
1920: Birth of Maurice Géminel in the Meuse, in Beauzé-sur-Aire. He grows up on his parent’s farm, the intellectual of the family.
1938: He is 18 years old and is a pupil at Saint Cyr (French military academy). Hitler has just invaded Austria and Czechoslovakia. At the declaration of war, he finds himself in the army: a young second lieutenant under the command of a certain colonel de Gaulle. After a defeat, he joins the free French forces and becomes an SAS officer, parachutes into Champagne to direct the resistance movement FFI for the Liberation.
After 1945, he creates the 11th Shock Troops, the ancestor of the Special Forces. Between 1950 and 1955, he finds himself in Germany, in the heart of the cold war. That’s where his son Patrick was born. In 1955, Massu calls Maurice beside him, in Algeria. Patrick goes to school in Kouba, a smart suburb in Algiers, while his father imagines the counter-terrorist war just before the battle of Algiers.
In 1958, Maurice has no time to act on his imaginings. He returns to military school and bears witness to the collapse of the IVth Republic in Paris and the return to power of general de Gaulle. Whilst his family settles down in Fresnes, Maurice obtains the command of a battalion.
Up to 1961, Maurice heads one thousand men on all fronts. He then returns to France, demoralized by the loss of French Algeria, missing the putsch of the generals, but refusing the OAS.
1964: He definitively leaves the army, his son is now 12 years old.
During the 1960s, Patrick grows up in the suburbs between rigorous Catholicism and the teddy boys, modern painting and Jacques Brel. He does badly at secondary school, bored by its’ professional appearance.
1968: He discovers the revolution as a traveller on the barricades, and his life is turned upside-down, to the despair of his father. He leaves on the road for Northern Europe, meets the daughter of a contemporary painter and goes with her to Art School in Paris. Patrick and Martine are modern artists, very quickly recognized. It is the time when the big decentralized theatres open in the communist suburbs. Teachers join the PCF in this period of euro-communism.
A the end of 1970s, they are, at times, at odds but live the Jack Lang years fondly.
1976: They have a son, Benjamin. Whereas his parents set up the Green party in Nanterre, a short time after Chernobyl, Benjamin enters school at the time of the first urban riots of Vaulx-en-Velin. He will voice all the radicalised happenings, from alternate rock and crude rap to the illegal immigrants and the anti-CIP Student Movement. He discourages living the way they did in 1968. When his school friends offer him an iron bar, encouraging him to vandalise a car, he refuses and returns to Nanterre where he invests in a lot of time with the NFA of the city.
In 2002 he crosses Europe in a small van fitted out with an itinerant photo lab. En-route to Bosnia, Benjamin heads for the ashes of a genocide that deeply upset him. Having learned about his past, Benjamin returns home. His daughter is one month old. She is cold Nina.
SPEAKERS
Fernand Gauvain was 18 years old when the resistance movement of Auberive took position on his farm. Jean Maire, another young opponent, joined this resistance movement after escaping from the Compulsory Labour Organization. Jean remembers mythical characters of the "paras" well. Together Fernand and Jean participate in ambushes and operations to sabotage.
Fabien Janelle was the manager of the MJ in Nanterre in 1972. It was the time of theatres, the establishment of cultural structures in the suburbs. The communist city halls were particularly active there. Patrick and Martine, who have just settled down in Nanterre, enjoy the cultural life during this invigorating period of the left wing Union. Around them is weaved a whole network of young intellectuals and engaged artists. For all of them, culture is a militant act.
Ernest Pignon-Ernest is a committed artist too. We know him especially for his collages in symbolic places, such as the stairs of the subway Charonne or his famous Rimbaud on the walls of Paris. For him, art must be shared by all, and is not to stay in galleries, but should be on the streets. It is at the Almond trees theatre that Patrick meets him.
ARTISTIC LIST
A documentary collectionby Christophe NICK A film by Patricia BODET Investigation: Alice ODIOT First assistant director: Thomas BORNOT Production director: Thomas BORNOT Montage: Pierre CATALAN Reseacher: Edwige LAFORET Photo directors: Stéphane RAMPILLON and Pierre BEFVE Sound engineer: David SEBAG Voice: Erwan DUJARDIN Sound montage and mixing: Marc PERNET Music: KRAKED UNIT Music director and supervisor: Loïk DURY Second assistant director: Clémence VEILHAN Administrative director: Rebecca WIRTH Financial director: Antoine BOUKOBZA Trainees: Elsa MORIN and Camille VERHAAK Produced by Christophe NICK
A YAMI 2 production With the contribution of CANAL + Documentaries direction: Christine CAUQUELIN, Françoise FEUILLYE and Philippe DE BOURBON With the contribution of BL films With the support of Centre National de la Cinématographie
Racines
"The Kaced family "
Broadcasted on June 6th, 2007 by Canal +
ABSTRACT
Return to the complex history of a French-Algerian family through the eyes of two cousins, Kahina and Katia, one born in France, the other one in Algeria.
SUMMARY
The course of an immigrant family, shaken by its repeated round trips between France and Algeria, collides with the consistent discovery of a familiar yet unfamiliar world. Beyond the generation to generation stories, we follow a couple - Marjouba and Seguir, then Fazia and Khassa. Over the course of seventy years two parallel fates merge, the one male, the other female. The history of their two countries separates them but also forces them to become entangled, much like France and Algeria. Cousins Kahina and Katia, born in the same year on either side of the Mediterranean Sea, make the continual collision more tangible through their questioning, their incomprehension’s and their complicity.
THE MAIN EVENTS
1945: In Kabylia, Marjouba is 10 years old when her family marries her off. She has her first child at 12 years old and is a widow at 15. Riots burst out in Setif. The French army makes a stand. Assessment: there are between 10 000 and 40 000 deaths. The scarcity of much-needed supplies that follows is dreadful. Marjouba’s mother cannot feed her. She arranges a wedding with a stranger living in Paris, (Seguir Kaced, a 40-year-old immigrant worker widower with three children). This man is already working within the armed Algerian nationalist Movement. Together, they have thirteen children. Amongst them is Khassa, the eldest son, and Fazia, born in 1959. Marjouba is ignorant in the new city she discovers. Her husband becomes an executive of the FLN in Paris.
Until 1962, Seguir leads a secret war for the collection of revolutionary money, while bringing up his children.
At the independance, he returns to Algiers, having decided to live there. Frightened by the dictatorship of the new power, sensing the imminent rebellion of the Kabyle, he must unwillingly go back to France.
In 1965, a work accident sees him lose his right hand and he can no longer work. His wife cleans houses whilst his daughters work on markets. At home, the colonel Boumediene takes power. Seguir knows that he will never return. His son Khassa pursues higher education and becomes an activist of the Third World, and funnily enough he is between Che Guevara, Hô Chi Minh and the Trotskyist tendency.
1975: The death of Seguir. Khassa returns his body to Algeria and rediscovers a country that fascinates him. The colonel Boumediene became the Fidel of Africa. The economy has greatly improved due to the sales of petrol. Khassa’s sister, Fazia, begins to go out with a young Frenchman, Didier Marchand, and, against the will of her mother, gets married. Khassa assumes his role of big brother. It is not easy, when his younger brothers find solace in the streets, rife with heroin. But his cousins from Algeria call him; Boumediene, the president, is sick. The country needs leadership. Khassa has to move back to Algiers. He gives in, settles down there, and gets married. His brother and sister both have their first children in 1981. Kahina grows in Algiers whereas Katia grows up in the Essonne. One named Kaced, the other, Marchand. The first sees the Islamic faith poisoning Algeria, and the second sees thugs take her young uncles away.
Between 1988 and 1991, Algeria turns upside down. After the extreme hopes for a democracy, the FIS take everything. The electoral process is interrupted, the leader of the FIS is arrested, and the civil war begins. Khassa, the father of Kahina, threatened with death by the FIS, goes back to France to prepare the return of his family. Kahina spends two years with her mother, who is a primary school teacher that refuses to wear the veil. Both cousins, Kahina and Katia, are 12 years old when they meet each other, the one an initial migrant and "bledarde", the other, a determined young Frenchwoman of north-African origin. They look at each other, judging. They then assume the lives of free girls. Kahina became a physiotherapist, Katia teaches French to the firstly migrants. They have the same roots, the same family, and the same nationality. But not the same history.
SPEAKERS
Benjamin Stora is a specialist in the history of Algerian immigration to France. Analyzing the feelings of banishment, the desire of mobilization that follows exile and the hardening of Algerian nationalism, he emphasizes the atypical course of Seguir Kaced, who joined the FLN having first belonged to the movement of the oulemas.
Author/producer Romain Goupil was 16 years old in May 1968. Like Khassa, he was close to the communist League and was also in the forefront of the revolt. From these historic events, he created the film "Die at thirty years". He explains the uncontrollable need for revolt and its consequences in the life of the ex-participants at the protest movement of May 1968.
Specialist in the history of the Algerians in France, Linda Amiri redraws the arrival of Seguir Kaced in France, a French Muslim from Algeria, treated as a second-class citizen. Looking back on the operations of the FLN, she reminds us of the dangers that these members accepted and insists on the subtle delicacy and secrecy of this political commitment.
ARTISTIC LIST
A documentary collection by Christophe NICK A film by Jean-Denis ROBERT Investigation: Alice ODIOT Production director: Thomas BORNOT First assistant director: Thomas BORNOT Assistant Director: Camille ROBERT Montage: datricia BARDIN Reseachers: Michèle GOUTS and Samia CHALA Photo directors: Stéphane RAMPILLON, Tafari TSIGE VIDALIE and Pierre BENZRIHEM Sound engineers: David SEBAG, Claude DE MAEYER, François LOUBERT and Hamid DIDOU Sound montage: Miguel MANRIQUE Sound mixing: Marc PERNET Music: KRAKED UNIT Music director and supervisor: Loïk DURY Music executive producer: Monte CHRISTO Infographic: Julien SARRAUTE Production assistant: Clémence VEILHAN Administrative director: Rebecca WIRTH Financial director: Antoine BOUKOBZA Trainees: Elsa MORIN and Camille VERHAAK Produced by Christophe NICK
A YAMI 2 production With the contribution of CANAL + Documentaries ditection: Christine CAUQUELIN, Françoise FEUILLYE and Philippe DE BOURBON With the contribution of BL films With the support of the Centre National de la Cinématographie
