With archives of great wealth, Frédéric Brunnquell returns to the social, economic and cultural history of this French region, from the end of the 19th century to the 1990s.
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A talented documentary maker, Frédéric Brunnquell has long worked on Brittany. “I got closer to the Bretons because in them the powerful mystery of attachment to the roots that brings these landmarks in our globalized world. I admire this spirit of resistance which has always characterized them,” he said.
Author, in 2016, of rock and red caps, documentary shot in Carhaix (Finistère), which has become the seat of the sling of the “red caps” and that of the festival Les Vieilles Charrues, this film told how, on a marked land By economic difficulties, the collective impulse precedes on individual withdrawal.
Two years later, Brunnquell turned storm men, aboard the largest French trawler for two months of fishing campaign, from Saint-Malo (Ille-et-Vilaine). And it is by making another film on Breton fishermen that Brunnquell discovered exceptional documents in the archives of the Cinémathèque de Bretagne.
Filmed and photographic archives of an incredible wealth, some dating from the end of the 19th e century, which he widely used to build this fascinating great history of Brittany, historic , social, economic and cultural in Brittany, from the end of the 19th th century to the 1990s.
of this particular region, long poor, despised and which, from agricultural revolutions to popular revolts, from sacrifices in struggles, has preserved its strong identity, Brunnquell has drawn a heritage story illustrated by these unpublished archives. But also by the testimonies of many Bretons who, by evoking the often terribly difficult life of their grandparents peasant or fishermen, make it possible to give flesh to this Breton saga.
Among the many filmed archives, we will remember some strong images: gigantic wedding festivals in the villages at the beginning of the 20th th century, amazement of the inhabitants of Saint-Nazaire and Brest in front of the American soldiers landed In 1917, strike of the sardini workers from Douarnenez (Finistère) in 1921 to obtain a decent salary, attacks of the Liberation Front of Brittany in the 1960s and 1970s.
Without forgetting an extract from the concert at the Olympia of Alan Stivell, in 1972. And also the trauma of the gigantic black tide following the sinking of Amoco-Cadiz, in 1978, or the big demonstrations against Nuclear in Plogoff (Finistère), in 1980.
Throughout the documentary hovers the shadow of an injury never healed: the ban taken by Jules Ferry in 1880 of the Breton language in schools. Over the decades, the fights to safeguard the Breton identity, to bring their language and culture to life will reach tangible results. Too poor and too populated, Brittany could not feed all its inhabitants at the beginning of the 20th e century. Today, it has become the favorite region of the French.