La Rue Longue
An elderly couple nearing ninety years of age live in a village in southwestern France at the foothills of the Pyrenees mountain chain. For the past few months, their daughter has returned to live with them to care for her mother, who suffers from Alzheimer's disease.
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Lea Vidotto LabastieDirector
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Lea Vidotto LabastieWriter
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Project Type:Short, Student
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Runtime:14 minutes 20 seconds
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Completion Date:December 31, 2024
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Country of Origin:France
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Country of Filming:France
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Language:French
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Shooting Format:Digital
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Film Color:Color
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First-time Filmmaker:Yes
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Student Project:Yes - Etnofilm School
Lea Vidotto Labastie is an Italian-French filmmaker exploring themes of memory and construction of identity through autobiographical documentary storytelling. After working in cinema, including pre-production for documentaries and at major film festivals, she directed her first short film, La Rue Longue, in 2024. She is currently continuing her studies in documentary filmmaking at the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión in Cuba.
Unspoken memories, the loss of the sense of time: only the trees in the garden are able to make us perceive the passing of time. La Rue Longue is the name of the street where my grandparents live, literally “long street” in French. How do we translate passing time into one's present? Is our past present in our lives even if we do not remember it? This short film does not seek to highlight memory loss in Alzheimer's patients but instead their suffering awareness of not being able to remember. Their memory is their identity: it allows them to recognize who they are, who they have been, and to find meaning in their being at the end of that long road.