Les Habitants

A small town in the suburbs of Paris with its housing estates, its rose and vegetable greenhouses, its inhabitants. It’s winter and a camp of roma people has settled in town. While the majority of the neighbours are displeased and demand that the newcomers be expelled, a few women are trying to help them inhabit the land they occupy.

The first impression given by the film is its low-key attentiveness, which makes it even more grating. The images shot on film tell of the ordinary, untroubled life of a small suburban market-gardening town on the fertile plain of the Ile de France region, everything neat and tidy, everything well ordered: the market-gardening firm, the horticulturalist, the postman, the dog trainer, the hidden bucolic corners and even paving around the edge of fields for walkers. A mother writes letters to her daughter in a gentle, clear and precise style, as if telling a story to a child. 
In this quite ordinary village, where some were certainly born and others live but were born elsewhere, the town hall puts up posters calling on the government to evict the travellers, while xenophobic and racist comments are given free reign, writes the mother. But some people are secretly providing help.
As the material assistance she gives to the undesirables becomes an integral part of her daily routine, her detailed description of life in the camp conveys an increasingly precise picture. Be it the winter cold or the summer heat, the lack of water or the collective purchase of a generator, through to the eviction of Loredana and her family. Inevitably, with no other clash in the small housing estate than a battle of papers between two petitioning clans who never actually come face to face.
While life flows gently by, smoothly and sweetly, Les Habitants surely tells us the troubling tale of our acquiescence to the rejection of a community, its eviction from slum areas and wastelands, and even to its disappearance.
 
Catherine Bizern