Alsény Bathily in “Gagarin” by Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh – High and Short
- “Gagarin” shows a positive vision of life in a city in the Paris region.
- This film crowned with the Cannes Label tells how a young man invents an alternative universe so as not to suffer from the destruction of the bar of buildings where he grew up.
- Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh deliver a poetic work with magnificent images.
Suburbs and cities can rhyme with solidarity. Gagarin by Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh, presented under the Cannes 2020 Label, defends this point of view with great energy. The action takes place in 2015 while the
Cite Gagarin d’Ivry will be destroyed. Youri (Alsény Bathily, a talented beginner) refuses to see the place where he grew up disappear.
Even his budding love for a young woman embodied by Lyna Khoudri (caesarized last year for Papicha by Mounia Meddour) is not enough to distance him from his obsession: saving, with the help of his neighbors, the bar of building which constitutes his universe since childhood.
Imagination versus reality
“This is the place that inspired the film to us,” explains the duo of filmmakers to 20 minutes. These buildings made us think of a spaceship and this is how we found the basis of our fiction. “Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh signed a documentary and then a short film on the city of Gagarin before developing this” feature “which surprises by its poetry borrows from a great tenderness for its hero.
“Yuri dreams of being an astronaut and his only way to achieve it is with his imagination”, insist the filmmakers. The young man will therefore invent an alternative universe that will allow him to escape a cruel reality. An illusion that he will share with those around him and with the spectators, conquered by so much generosity.
A benevolent column
“We wanted to show the life of a city in what it can have of beauty and solidarity, specify the directors. Gagarin also came from our desire to stand out from works that portray the suburbs as a place of violence. This benevolent vision brings great sweetness to a chronicle between documentary and dreamlike tale in which former inhabitants came to say hello.
Gagarin reveals the singular talents of its authors like that of its main actor. It’s hard to contain your emotion in front of a final scene of breathtaking beauty. With Alsény Bathily, Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh won their bet to make the city of Gagarin take off at the same time as the heart of the spectator. We wish them the brilliant career that this magnificent film suggests.