Les Gens Des Baraques

In 1970, more than a hundred shanty towns still encircled Paris, and Saint-Denis then counted as one of the three largest Portuguese cities in Europe. At the time, Robert Bozzi was shooting a documentary film for the French Communist Party, viewing the inhabitants as "a social group that was particularly exploited by capital". With the years, the political force of the images has waned to reveal their human intensity and now what interests him are the people and what has become of them. His inquiry takes him into the Saint-Denis housing estates which have since replaced the shacks, and he listens to the accounts of the older generation Portuguese, who are brothers in hardship and the sons of poverty. Obsessed by the photograph of a new-born child, who becomes the symbolic through-line of the film, Robert Bozzi pursues his quest as far as Portugal and Switzerland...

In 1978, Ruiz was commissioned to make a television documentary about the French elections from the viewpoint of a Chilean exile in Paris’ eleventh arrondissement. But, contrary to the producers’ expectation, the Left lost. Ruiz seized on this anti-climax to make a documentary about nothing except itself – a film whose central subject is forever lost in digression and ‘dispersal’, harking back to his Chilean experiments of the ‘60s. Its political content is deliberately left negligible: it’s hard to tell at the end who did actually win the election, let alone why.

Beth, Calvin, and their son Conrad are living in the aftermath of the death of the other son. Conrad is overcome by grief and misplaced guilt to the extent of a suicide attempt. He is in therapy. Beth had always preferred his brother and is having difficulty being supportive to Conrad. Calvin is trapped between the two trying to hold the family together.

When a housewife finds out she is pregnant, she runs out of town looking for freedom to reevaluate her life decisions.