After “My Life as a Zucchini”, an animated feature film which brought together more than a million spectators to the cinema, Claude Barras directed “Sauvages”, the story of Keria, a pre-teen from Borneo who takes in a baby orangutan found in the palm oil plantation where his father works, and who fights the company that destroys his ancestral forest.
In this film, the term “Savage” does not have the same meaning or the same designation depending on who it is used by. “I used the word in the dialogues two or three times with different meanings and the title is therefore free to interpret.“, says the director. The film shows quite clearly the moments of tension between these inhabitants from the tribe and the representatives of the company: “I try to be on a child’s level, and the world they discover in real life is very hard. By talking to them frankly, by showing them things, sometimes it’s more interesting for them than leaving them to guess half-heartedly.“, he said.
Grand Angle Listen later
Lecture listen 2 min
“When we do politics, we should be interested in the common good”
Claude Barras says he was initially interested in the agri-food industry.and to the politicians who support them, because palm oil is not taxed in Europe and in Switzerland where I live either. We wonder why, who benefits from this, because for the farmers here, it’s not good. For people who eat industrial palm oil, it is not good for their health. And for the forests, the people who live there, it’s really not good either“. The first sentence of the film is “The land does not belong to us, we borrow it from our children: “When we do politics, we should be interested in the common good and pass it on to our children in a state that is at least correct“.
He thus recalls the idea that the return to the forest, to nature, is an important value: “When I went there, there was a little girl who had returned to the forest because ultimately, her whole family had said that she was unhappy at school and that forest school, learning to living in the forest is still a very, very nice school. And like me, I also have a little daughter, I also returned to the countryside and I teach her how to garden, to see vegetables grow. I think that our relationship with the living, our relationship with the earth, is the thing that we have really lost and that it is urgent to relearn“.
