Behind the Walls

France, the nineteen thirties. Fourteen year old Yves Treguier, an orphan, sees the world from behind the bars of places called educational homes, where the conditions are no different from a penal colony. He refuses the judgement society has passed on him and dreams of escaping across the ocean to New York. The film shows these homes not as places that reform but as places that shut children away, and records the hierarchy inside them. The account rests on a memoir, so its details come from the memory of one particular child. The dream of escape is both the engine of the story and a way of enduring. Emile Berling and Carole Bouquet appear in Christian Faure’s ninety one minute French film, completed in 2008.