Going On Strike

The idea for À bras-le-corps was born in 2019, a year marked by major social movements around the world, driven by an urgent desire to transform our systems. Then came the pandemic, temporarily suspending these collective impulses, isolating bodies and reconfiguring our ways of being together. But the need to take to the streets didn't go away, and soon bodies were once again gathering in public spaces. It was the expression of this solidarity and collectivity that inspired me. Our times are dizzying. But in the midst of chaos, solidarity remains an act of hope. It's precisely this strength of a “we” in motion, this resilience of resistance, that I wanted to explore in this film.
Dance seemed the ideal medium for exploring this subject, as it opens up a space for abstraction, allowing us to go beyond reality and imagine other possibilities. Here, I approach dance as a political gesture: the body in movement can be political, just as a body in public space is political. For À bras-le-corps, I asked myself how demonstrations or protest are shaped and evolve in public space, and how they are mediated. The film grew out of our stories and our sometimes troubled relationships with demonstrations, as well as iconographic research that nourished the film's visual and sensory universe.
Working with the director of photography was crucial. The use of two different cameras enabled us to play with points of view: an immersive, moving camera at the heart of the dance, and a more distant camera questioning the outside view of these uprisings. I wanted to question the way we produce and perceive images of demonstrations. All too often, these moments are frozen in a rhetoric of violence, leaving little room for forms of collective organization and moments of solidarity. By mixing media images, fiction and choreographic work, I wanted to offer an oblique view, a displacement of the usual narrative to open up a space for reflection and visual reappropriation.
Working with the dancers in a participatory and discursive choreographic approach, we sought to deconstruct the usual patterns of representation of demonstrations and move away from the expected representations of violence: instead of depicting head-on confrontations, we turned gestures of confrontation into acts of care and mutual support. It's not a question of erasing violence, but of questioning its representation and focusing on other dimensions of collective commitment. If some people have lost faith in the effectiveness of demonstrations, which are all too often reinterpreted or diverted from their original intentions, the fight can continue elsewhere: in transmission, listening, education and memory.
À bras-le-corps is a cinematic tribute to past and future struggles, to protest as an act of transmission and resistance.