Director Ilan Teboul became interested in looking for a job and benchmarks of “dropouts”, without diploma and without training, but determined to go beyond the shame of precariousness.
by Mouna El Mokhtari
“My goal is to find a fixed work and which I like, without having a boss who yells at us all day long.” Tiffany is 19 years old and benefits from the youth warranty, state aid device for people between 16 and 25 years old. The entry criteria of this system were relaxed in February 2021, as the difficulties multiplied, with the health crisis, for young people who were looking to fit into the professional world in 2020.
In the Bas-Rhin, the department where the documentary of Ilan Teboul was shot, unemployment of under 25 (in category A) increased by 10 % in 2020, according to figures from Pôle Emploi and the Directorate of research, studies and statistics animation (DARES).
The director went to Alsace to follow the course of a dozen “dropouts” – they are nearly 500,000 each year in France. He put his cameras at the local Mission of Molsheim (Bas-Rhin), upstream of the Bruche Workers’ Valley, half an hour from Strasbourg. Several dozen young people receive intensive support in search of jobs.
Adolescents whose director captures, without narration in voiceover, the moving path to adulthood. They are all between 17 and 20 years old and already trajectories damaged by school failures, family conflicts, sometimes sexual violence. When they disembark at the Local Mission of Molsheim, some have not left their room for more than a year and only attend their family on a daily basis. Successful rhymes with leaving, in a way. But this first departure is already expedition: without a license, one must take three buses, another rises at dawn and ends his night in his mother-in-law’s car…
Bringing the inertia is also accepting to reveal yourself in the collective workshops of the local mission, daring to disturb, go beyond the shame that we derive from its precariousness or the violence that one undergoes. Simply believe in yourself. “When I wanted to go into photographer studies and my math teacher told me that I could never get there with my average and that I should make a professional baccalaureate instead, I listened to it. And I regret “, says Sandra, in the collective theater workshop. “I know that I debute a number of astronomical bullshit”, loose Dorian, 17 years old.
Mobility, exclusion, rupture with the world of work, the director shows as much the dead ends of certain relationships of adult domination towards young people as the modest journey of these to others to “redo society” and take more serenely Their independence.