Les gens des baraques

Directed by Robert Bozzi

In 1970, more than a hundred shanty towns still encircled Paris, and Saint-Denis then counted as one of the three largest Portuguese cities in Europe. At the time, Robert Bozzi was shooting a documentary film for the French Communist Party, viewing the inhabitants as "a social group that was particularly exploited by capital". With the years, the political force of the images has waned to reveal their human intensity and now what interests him are the people and what has become of them. His inquiry takes him into the Saint-Denis housing estates which have since replaced the shacks, and he listens to the accounts of the older generation Portuguese, who are brothers in hardship and the sons of poverty. Obsessed by the photograph of a new-born child, who becomes the symbolic through-line of the film, Robert Bozzi pursues his quest as far as Portugal and Switzerland...