Moissac. The documentary “La Traversée fertile” blows a wind of humanism

The Migrant'scène festival, organized by the Cimade association (Intermovement Committee for Evacuees, founded in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War by Protestant youth collectives to come to the aid of people evacuated from Alsace and Lorraine ), is a beacon which, every year, at the end of November, illuminates the night of obscurantism and withdrawal.

A national festival with a local dimension

“The festival is taking place this year in around 120 cities, in an unfortunately deleterious context where racist and xenophobic speech is being released, whether at the national level or at the local level,” declared Marie Carladous, head of the branch. tarn-et-garonnaise of the association, as a preliminary to the screening which was organized at the Le Concorde cinema in Moissac, as part of the festival this Thursday, November 21, in front of a large audience.

The documentary “La Traversée fertile” was thus offered for broadcast at the Concorde cinema in Moissac, in this small provincial town with a sociological context and an emblematic political prism. But as the two co-directors Marie Dubois and Dimitri Serres, present at the evening, underlined: “This manifesto is not political, but poetic, and seeks to show these personal journeys over time and the poetry that releases it, beyond the pain of exile, isolation, illness.”

The message of the film is, in fact, clear: the audience follows individual journeys, made of tears but also of laughter, emotions, creativity, people like others, citizens of the world. Some have fled inhospitable regions, others have become diluted among the invisible people of the streets, others are trying to regain their health.

But under the impetus of the departmental council and its emanation Tarn-et-Garonne Arts & Culture (TGAC), they were able to sublimate themselves thanks to the Fertile Creations system, set up in spring 2023.

Several dozen participants, through music and body expression workshops in collaboration with numerous partners (Emmaüs 82, Accueil Montauriol, Relience 82, the musicians of the Cuarteto Tafi group, the dancer Juliette César), finalized a stage project which materialized in two performances at the Espace Descazeaux in Castelsarrasin and at the Arène Coin de culture en campagne in Coutures. A real catharsis.

Stories with sometimes broken lifelines

The film offers a focus, where the camera knows how to make itself forgotten, on the tribulations of five participants. “They left everything to stay alive”, underlines Marie Dubois, with a real “desire for France”, expressed with a heart “as big as that” by Vasili, a companion of Emmaüs, a fifty-year-old Georgian with multiple degrees, painter, character in documentary and present at the evening. He was accompanied by his compatriot Zaza, so touching on screen in his aspirations for a simple, dignified and happy life. Because this is the great strength of the film: showing that migrants, the homeless, the sick, are not uniform and anonymized categories but individuals whose lifelines are sometimes broken, and who are trying to find real dignity.

In this sense, the journey of Mario, a school director who left Colombia with his wife and children, or those of Mostapha and Meddy, in search of family roots tossed between France, Algeria and Portugal , are touchingly human. A touching and necessary film.