Constellation de la Rouguière

"In the wake of the Algerian war of independence (1954-1962), repatriates and immigrants ended up settling in Marseille, specifically in the fledgling neighborhood of La Rouguière, an area then barely built-up. Constellation talks about their experience and their memories - about their losses as well.
Dania Reymond-Boughenou, an Algerian by birth who came to France at the age of 12, confronts in this medium-length film a crucial question for any film that tries to be a link between the past and the present: how to stage emotional traces? The film begins with aerial shots of a drone flying over the district. The images, cadenced, invite us to adopt an omniscient point of view, almost belonging to the afterlife. Perhaps that of the ghost or the absent. We hear some voices in off but we do not see their faces. They are neighbors from different generations who share their experience, anonymous people interviewed by the director who participated in a family constellation therapy during the process of the film. People who came, people who left, people who return. We would say that these memories draw a documentary grid that will be completed later by professional actors. That is to say, that first bird's eye view, supernatural, ends up coming down to earth to be “reincarnated” in a series of characters. The living and the dead coexist; memory and fiction. ANDREA MORÁN