Feature Documentary Competition | France | French with Arabic and English subtitles | 67 min
«Plot 35 is a place that my family never mentioned; it is the place where my elder sister is buried, she died when she was three years old. Nobody told me anything about her and, strange enough, my parents did not have one single picture of her. It is to fill this absence of images that I made this fim” (E. Caravaca)
And so Caravaca embarks on a veritable investigation looking for clues, important dates, official and administrative documents and even family films on Super 8. He asks to his parents about her but each of their sentences add to the mystery: his mother claims that Christine lived to three years of age, while his father, who dies during the process of the film’s creation, claims it was only four months, and travel documents imply that neither parent was present when the girl died.
The reason this film is so engrossing though, it is that the director, looking for evidence about the existence of his sister and the reason why his parents decided to erase her memory, starts questioning the “big history” about its mechanisms of erasing memories and rewriting them. His fight to restore his private memories becomes, through shocking newsreel footage of atrocities during the Algerian war of independence, the fight to restore truth in a history, to save also, by presenting these neglected images, all the people they portray from the flames of a history that decides what should and what should be not remembered.
Eric Caravaca is a very famous french actor .He won the César award for Most Promising Actor in 2000 for his performance in François Dupeyron’s C’est quoi la vie?, later receiving a Best Actor nomination for The Officers’ Ward (2002), also by Dupeyron. His first work as a director was The Passenger, which screened at the Venice Film Festival Critics’ Week in 2005, won the Jury Grand Prize and the Audience Award at Belfort Film Festival, and the Best Director Award at Ourense Film Festival. Caravaca’s latest performance was in Philippe Garrel’s Lover for a Day, selected at the 2017 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight.
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