Documentary Vidéo Color
52min.
2012
Kevin and Gaël are 17.
I wanted to spend time with them in that fragile, dizzying gap of boredom : just before life truly begins. A life with blurred edges, full of drifting desires. I hold the camera, and Aline holds the microphone at my side. We are not so far in age from the protagonists. The documentary gesture allows us to be there, to share this stretch of time, and to try to capture the emptiness (that is so full) when you are 17.
(…)The filmmaker knows these young people well, as well as the country they are attached to but that cannot sustain them. She approaches them with a gentle firmness, exploring their motivations and revealing their hesitations. She presents them as part of the same brotherhood. Without any rhetoric, she disrupts the familiar image of the masculine volunteer soldier. What emerges is a vivid portrait of youth, alert yet fragile, shaped by the army’s rules, yet marked by a quiet gratitude, perhaps because there is no other path.
Serge Meurant, 9 december 2011
Production : VOA asbl
Co-production : CBA
With the support of Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles,
Communauté française de Belgique, Région Rhône-Alpes, GSARA
Director and camera Manon Coubia
Assist. Zoé Tabourdiot and Emmanuelle Cuny
Production assist. Marianne Néplaz
Sound Aline Huber Backup Origan Cannella
Editing Muriel Alliot
Mixing Malika El Barkani
