Adnane Tragha, 47, grew up opposite the HLM bars of Gagarin, this city “rouge” (PCF town hall) located in Ivry-sur-Seine, emblematic of the Parisian suburbs. All his friends came from “Gag” and he felt at home there. But at the age of 28, his studies finished, he hastened like many to flee this district. However, it was impossible to remain indifferent when he learned, in 2019, that this huge set of red bricks was be destroyed and all his memories and attachment to the place resurface.
In On a grandi ensemble, filmed and produced in total independence, he wanted to tell from his point of view the neighborhood he knew. Its objective: to leave a mark and pay tribute to the historic inhabitants of this complex of 350 homes, inaugurated in jubilation in 1963 in the presence of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.
In the fall of 2019, while the city emptied of its inhabitants, leprous walls and doors walled up against the squatters, awaits the diggers in dead silence, Adnane Tragha seizes this unexpected setting to testify one by one, facing camera, a dozen Gagarin men and women. On deserted landings or two-room apartments, these people revive the life of the neighborhood but also share their life paths.
There is Michel, who arrived at the very beginning, at the age of 17. “When I saw this mountain of red bricks, my life changed“, he remembers. There was the elevator, a radiator in each room, a shower and toilets in the apartment. Byzantium. This impression of comfort will not last. The buildings are deteriorating rapidly, the lessor does not There was no fund for maintenance.With the industrial crisis, unemployment and social misery set in, and with them, in the 1980s, drugs and AIDS.
However, among former Gagarin like Karim, Yvette, Mehdy, Daniel or Karima, we rather remember the positive and the solidarity. A large family where the inhabitants, often of immigrant origin, are linked by their belonging to this place. Gagarin marks identities. “I would never be that person without Gagarin“, assure several speakers. It is an issue both inside, where you have to impose yourself to exist, and outside, where the Gagarinois are seen as “wild” and downgraded.
The prejudices that we have about them, the inhabitants of the neighborhoods send them back in a boomerang on society. It is only far from the city, when they have the chance to get out of it, that they learn to free themselves from the gaze of others and to put things into perspective, “not to judge people of less modest origin as bourgeoisIn the same way, Samira, who studied at Harvard in the United States, confides that she felt French there for the first time.
One interlocutor in particular bursts the screen: Loïc, alias the rapper K-Fear from La Brigade, whose frank talk irrigates the whole film. From childhood, he has only good memories, even if he had to prove himself very early and a lot of bullshit to be admitted, “dangerous stuff“. Afterwards, it goes bad. “As a teenager, I felt cramped in Gagarin“. He then just discovered hip-hop. “Çhas revolutionized my life. I didn’t have a father, hip-hop raised me“, he says.
Surprise: in Gagarin, where the two PNL rappers spent part of their adolescence and shot in 2019 at the same time as Adnane Tragha their clip Two brothers, early hip-hop was poorly perceived. “Hip-hop, I did that on the sly. Artistically, I could not express myself here“, recalls Loïc: “din the city there is zero tolerance for originality.”
The influence of the PCF is of course mentioned, in a nuanced way: the undeniable efforts of the communist town hall in favor of young people with the neighborhood branches, as well as the way in which the paternalistic elected “cocos” dissuaded the inhabitants who tried to enter politics. Without forgetting “thehouse arrest” felt by all young people, who, old enough to emancipate themselves and dreaming of elsewhere, were invariably offered accommodation in the city near their parents.
Adnane Tragha films these 13 floors of red brick and the rails of the train that runs along the city with a certain gentleness. Without going into an off-topic aesthetic, he seems to want to attenuate the depressing side and the harshness of the place, which sometimes seems almost luminous, as if passed through the filter of memories. To revive the effervescence of a time that is no more, he does not disdain a bit of staging: he recreates the games of children in the stairwells, fantasizes a nightclub in a building hall , films clouds of glowing smoke, giving the documentary a touch of dreamlike melancholy. A group of musicians led by Manu Merlot, filmed in the middle of the ruins, also punctuates the film.
With delicacy and sensitivity, the director sheds light on the inspiring journeys of inhabitants of a working-class district, who are too often invisible. By showing these faces and listening to these words, he puts the human at the center of the discourse. Everywhere in France, in the suburbs where this film was shown in preview, the inhabitants found themselves there.
Genre : documentary
Realization and production : Adnane Tragha
Pays : France
Duration : 1h12
Sortie : September 21, 2022
Synopsis : In Ivry-sur-Seine, in the inner suburbs of Paris, the Gagarin city was a symbol. Destroyed in 2020, this film brings it back to life, through the eyes of Adnane Tragha, who grew up opposite, and through the words of its former inhabitants. Back in the deserted city, they evoke their memories of the place. Daniel, Loïc, Karima, Yvette, Foued, Samira or even Mehdy tell their story, their experience, their feelings.
Note : “On a grandi ensemble” is also a book by Adnane Tragha, richly illustrated and more personal, published by JC Lattès.