It is in the old railway refrigerated warehouses of the XIIIe arrondissement of Paris (called “Les Frigos”), now occupied by artists, that Florence Miailhe receives us. His studio has been here, the same for thirty years, cluttered with canvases, drawings, books. Above our heads hangs the large fabric ribbon on which the director has painted the successive paintings of Crossing, his first feature film. It represents one of the stages of this film which waited ten years before finding its financing. A crazy story for the filmmaker, an example of tenacity on the part of the producer Dora Benousilio. And, in the end, a little gem realized in animated painting whose story embraces both a personal story and that of the migrants of the 20th century.e century.
The personal story is that of Florence Miailhe, first inherited from her great-grandparents, Jews of Odessa who, in 1905, fled the pogroms and the Ukraine, with their nine children. Then from her mother, sent alone with her younger brother on the roads of France, in 1940, to reach the free zone. “I hadn’t really felt the urge to tell this story that I didn’t know not the details, specifies the director. And it was in 2005, when we started to talk about sub-Saharan migration that the echo occurred. The permanence of the history of migration is what I wanted to tell. I started to think about it in 2006, projecting myself for the first time in a long format. Was it possible? The answer was yes when I came up with the idea for the chapters: to create six atmospheres, as if they were six short films put together. “
Permanent risk taking
In the process, she called on the writer Marie Desplechin, a long-time accomplice who was her co-writer on three of her eight short films, Scheherazade (1995), The story of a prince who became one-eyed and beggar (1996), Neighborhood tale (2006). Quickly, they decide to abandon all historical and geographical references. “We wanted to write a timeless story in places that are not directly identifiable. Animation allows it. A dress, trucks, weapons can be represented in a color, without precise outlines, all of this becoming something more dreamlike. “
They also choose to focus their story on a sister and a brother, Kyona and Adriel, close figures of Hansel and Gretel. The tale guides their work. “We built the narration on“ chapters ”which each correspond to a domain of the tale and simultaneously to a current situation of the paths of exile. Thus, the street children are referred to as “raven brothers”, the old woman who collects Kyona in the forest like a Baba Yaga, the couple who buy children like ogres… ”
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