Georgette, Germain, François, le laboureur et le forgeron

Jean-Luc Prince

France / 2024 / Documentary / 41’47”N2501406

Georgette, Germain, François, le laboureur et le forgeron
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SYNOPSIS

‘Georgette, Germain, François, le laboureur et le forgeron’, 42 minutes, written and directed by Jean-Luc Prince, 2024 - jlp production. Georgette, Germain, François, the ploughman and the blacksmith are the characters in a first documentary film shot in 1993 in Saint-Anatoly, a village in Haute-Garonne, France. The film recounted the last year of work for twin brothers Germain and François, who had been tenant farmers since the end of the Second World War. Georgette, a remarkable storyteller born in 1922, played the role of narrator. ‘Saint-Anatoly’ was shown at the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival in 1995. Between 2020 and 2023, I returned to Saint-Anatoly in search of the images and sounds sown in the memories by my characters, who have now disappeared. I reconstructed a part of their lives by comparing Georgette's dated account with the present-day memories - imperfect, fragmentary and often vivid - of Saint-Anatoly residents of all ages. These mixed representations, set against bare landscapes, are a painful reminder of the loss of one state: that of peasant. Nevertheless, the festivals organised by the Foyer Rural de Saint-Anatoly continue to attract record numbers of visitors, as if it were a question of preserving an ancient collective ritual.

GÉNÉRIQUE