(Berlin Luigi Noera with the kind collaboration of Marina fearful – Photos are published courtesy of the Berlinale)

Premiered at the Berlinale 2021 - Encounters section - Nous is the latest feature film by French director Alice Diop.

The RER, Paris, is a special metropolitan transport network. And just as in his time Ganfranco Rosi did in the documentary Sacro G.R.A., the director told us a series of stories of people who live in different areas of the city (in which, just, passes the RER) in order to trace a colorful fresco of contemporary society, showing us the most disparate situations each time and observing the people filmed from time to time with due detachment, but also with an extraordinary closeness. Physical and emotional.

And so, the documentary has an elliptical structure: it opens and closes with the image of a family of hunters observing from afar, with their binoculars, a deer. From that moment on, numerous stories will come to life before our eyes. A young mechanic from Mali will decide to send his mother a new mobile phone. A woman works as a nurse and goes from house to house every day to care for the elderly. On their faces the signs of a difficult past and numerous sufferings, that, however, they soon give way to a smile and a certain resilience. Because, in fact, it is precisely resilience that allows these people not to "get lost", to move forward, to continue their long and difficult journey within the great and cosmopolitan Paris.

The end result is a clean and sincere documentary, a rich and varied documentary, with a thousand colors and many facets. Sign of a society in which it is more difficult than ever to maintain contact with oneself and acquire one's own awareness. A society observed by Alice Diop in an affectionate and obsequious way: during the filming the director, except for some fleeting exchange of words with the protagonists, it appears to us as invisible as possible in front of the camera. Unlike, the same leaves the protagonists to behave naturally, continuing their usual duties. Not afraid, the director, of long silences. And sometimes it's just nature - or, depending on the situation, the city - which with its noises breaks the silence and creates a sort of symphony that immediately becomes the leitmotif of the entire work.

And here, immediately, let's think back to Gianfranco Rosi's documentary and how it differs from Diop's film. In Sacro G.R.A., Unfortunately, the stories of the protagonists are often "artificial", as if clouded by a sort of underlying megalomania on the part of the director. In the present We, instead, the words are left exclusively to the protagonists. Are they, from time to time, to bring the documentary to life. And the camera immediately becomes a precious confidant and silent spectator of what happens in front of its lens.

marina fears