“Those of Night”: in Alps, on border between two worlds

Through voice -over, Sarah Leonor paints the portrait of migrants and volunteers who help them, with the mountain in the background.

by Clarisse Fabre

This is a title that sounds like a poem or as the sketch of a falsely sleepy landscape: those of the night, Sarah Leonor, is similar to a work of painter, geographer, even anthropologist, the Auscultating director with rare intensity a transit territory on the Franco-Italian border. Here we are perched at the top of the Montgenèvre pass (1,850 meters above sea level), located in France, in the Hautes-Alpes, but also a handful of kilometers from Italy. This paradise of hikers, golfers and skiers is also a crossing point for migrants who are looking for their way to the city of Briançon, where there is a solidarity refuge. From the first images, here we are hanging on stone, rocky trails dotted with clues and life traces of exiles, behind the main road where the police dams are installed.

Rather than filming migrants – with the risk of endangering them – or the volunteers who come to their aid, Sarah Leonor has chosen to brush hollow portraits, using in voiceover that she had collected Before filming – which are taken up by actors, Solène Rigot, Damien Bonnard and Olivier Rabourdin, interpreting the marauders. Occupating all the visual space, nature and rock walls become silent witnesses of all human actions, and that is what makes the film exciting. The images (of archives or contemporary) mingle with the words of the protagonists, in a free and poetic flow. A voice that seems to come from the mountain (Françoise Lebrun, with a single stamp) acts as a narrator, connecting long time and the micro-actuals.

Text-image editing powerfully opens the imagination and terrifies us, too. Those of the night has something of a cruel tale, with its characters who no longer have sleep as light as before. There is Martin, who discovered the territory, as a child, when he visited, in summer, to his uncle installed on the Italian side of the pass. An extract from a vacation film shows us a little boy playing in the river, with “deep joy and total freedom”, the narrator tells us. Later, Martin became a geographer and settled in the region with his family. One day, in a parking lot, he met two young exiles who seemed lost. He offered to drive them to Briançon, but on the way they were arrested by the police and returned to Italy. One of the men in uniform warned the geographer: next time, he will be in trouble with justice.

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/Media reports cited above.