[critical] A Week in December

A camera, two journalists, a motorhome.

Two journalists from the drafting of the LCM are installed for a week in a camp of the 15th arrondissement of Marseille, home to a Roma family. The family Gjuliaj a native of Kosovo. This proximity has allowed Sahar, Dasuhrije and their four children to forget about the camera. This documentary book of their testimony. A word rare.

Author’s Note

[rating:7/10]

• Release Date : march 31, 2013 (LCM)

• Directed by Fanny Fontan, Margaïd Quioc

• Film French

• Duration : 52min

• Original title : A Week in December

• Page Facebook : A Week in December

• Trailer :

With such a title, this documentary would have been able to talk about snow, holidays, or tourism. But it is not. There is no snow (or very little of Marseille), or a vacation and even less tourism for Roma. Just want a pied-à-terre, if possible, definitive. Nothing is impossible and something that is accessible-one could believe it, but it is in fact a little more complicated than it looks.

With a topic like this documentary would have been falling into the trap of easy shortcuts and well-placed : the poor people, who have a life of misery, a strong indulgence would be. But here, again, this is not the case. These two journalists from a local television station based in Marseille, LCM, have just transcribed, day after day, the daily life of this family : the alarm clock in the bedroom, their hygiene to their intimate life, of the education of the children to a desire become a natural and strong feeling of having a home, a job and to be French. You can take example on Samanta, who has identity papers yugoslav, a country that no longer exists since 10 years.

Follow for a week the family Gjulial, including four children, has been a way of the cross social and geographical. From Kosovo, the parents have travelled not less than 14 000 kilometres through Europe and were expelled once to Germany and twice in France. These parents have a specific purpose, unique : a pied-à-terre definitive, in order to live and make a living for their children.

Far away events and the different media taking over and hammering the famous evictions – each day spent in the camp started by a small sound from radio, where you can hear the news – the family Gjulial continues to live, or survive, day after day, under the gateway motorway.

Fanny Fontan and Margaïd Quioc, directors of the documentary, inaugurating the first 52 minutes. This logically entails, by the time a few plans “draft” and a music sometimes badly anchored. However, the ideas – both in the timeline and in the images, are there, and we can only advise to follow in their future productions.

This documentary is therefore an immersion in a non-intrusive but blatant of a country and a state that does not know – and who sometimes doesn’t know what to do with these Roms. However, Sahar, the father of the family, always attending her children and provided for his family’s needs. An example that does without a doubt not a generality in the eyes of all but that can’t go unnoticed.

Far from the cliché of evictions of Roma and of the maudlin, A Week in December struck a doorway, which was too long for rust to coat it with enthusiasm, valor, and why not change ?