“After the walls” by Ambre Ciselet
Serge is 66 years old, 27 of whom have been behind bars. Originally from a small village in Belgium, this son of a miner began a career as a delinquent very early on. At 15, after a difficult childhood and a period in a reformatory, he has already accumulated five stays in prison. From his first theft of coins, which earned him the admiration of his comrades, to armed robberies and multiple escapes, he recites in a calm voice the stages of a life of adventure and transgression.
A way of life that sometimes borders on the absurd: enlisted in the army with the hope of getting back on the right track, he steals an officer’s vehicle to… go see Johnny Hallyday in concert – he will end up by deserting and fled to Italy. During one of his many incarcerations, he meets an inmate he knows well: his father, convicted of attempted homicide on… his mother. Released, the latter transmits to his son a weapon hidden in a radio set. Which escapes with his companions. Recaptured, then sentenced to a heavy sentence, he will still manage to escape on the way back from the courthouse. The whole story is to match: intense and earthy. HR
“Sylvette and Michèle Viale – sister islands” by Ingrid Blanchard
In the 1920s, Sylvette and Michèle’s grandfather, a fisherman of Italian origin, rowed to Port-Cros before settling a little further east, on the island of Levant. . Their father grew up on the ” little sister luminous and rebellious of Porquerolles”, off Hyères. It was the time, in 1932, when two doctors, André and Gaston Durville, initiators of naturism in France, created the domain of Heliopolis which they had imagined as “a simple rustic city where sun worshipers will come in the calm of a splendid nature to rest from the fatigues of the artificial civilization of the cities […]. With the sole luxury of a high ideal and robust health”.
What remains of this ideal, Ingrid Blanchard asks Sylvette and Michèle, these two “intermittent islanders” in love with a little piece of paradise where “in winter, you can find water at 18 degrees in a small hollow in the rock and, if it’s stormy, go pick wild asparagus” ? One regrets that 40 swimming pools were allowed to be built when the sea is within reach of flip-flops and the other regrets that the Levant today welcomes more nudists than naturists… The nuance is to be discovered in this episode and in the entire series dedicated to the happy inhabitants of this special place. AS
“Frag Levant Island” – fragileporquerolles.com
