Swagger

Eleven children and teenagers at a middle school in Aulnay-sous-Bois, on the edge of Paris, talk. They talk about love, the future, fashion, their families, their neighbourhood and the rest of the city. Olivier Babinet listens to them one at a time with a fixed camera, and what they say turns out to be far more interesting than anyone would expect. Where the film refuses to be a documentary is in staging what the children describe. Babinet builds the images in their heads together with them, and a school corridor becomes a runway, a scene becomes something out of science fiction. The result is neither a poverty report nor a banlieue cliché. Nobody is pitied and nobody is held up as an example; eleven people stand there in their own words, their own taste and their own humour.