Sablé-sur-Sarthe, Sarthe

Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens was only a year old when he arrived in Sablé-sur-Sarthe following his father’s death in 1946. During his life there, many events took place, which shaped him, serious events which were not spoken about and which became what we refer to clumsily as family secrets. It was there, too, that he stumbled across his Jewish origins. What he aimed to do was to recreate the magnitude of those silences. He wanted to bring those spaces and those times to life, the life of a child and then an adolescent in a stagnant, inward-looking little provincial town with its twitching curtains. An examination of the evolution of this provincial community, its landscapes, streets and inhabitants, research into family archives and a revisiting of accounts of personal memories is the plait, which the film tries to weave.