It’s a blue house, located in the sparse and colorful hamlet of Oqaatsut – it’s pronounced “Oratsoute” – on the west coast of Greenland. It is there, 350 kilometers from the Arctic Circle, that Frank Bruno, 58, lives during the summer months, far from his native Corsica.
By way of presentation, the soundtrack broadcasts extracts from reports dedicated to this extreme adventurer, who twenty years ago created the Bout de vie association, to enable amputees, like him, to travel, far away, and regain confidence in themselves.
We recognize the voice of the 1998 world football champion Bixente Lizarazu, who met him in 2015 for a documentary in the Frères de sport series. Seven years later, Frank Bruno presents his own film, in which he shares his thoughts, while the camera follows him in his daily life, shared between moments of solitude in majestic nature and those spent within the Gabrielsen family, who ended up accepting it, before meeting up with a group of hikers, amputees or not, whom he will guide during a poignant six-day climb.
Atypical, the approach shakes up certainties and can seem egocentric. “Being the first guy with a disability to row across the Atlantic, to walk to the North Pole or to cross Greenland from west to east is ego,” says Frank Bruno. , as if he had anticipated the questioning.
Different phases of resilience
On June 9, 1983, while a soldier aboard the aircraft carrier Foch, a plane crushed his right leg and left him, at the age of 18, amputated below the knee. “What’s going to save me is diving,” he says. It took him twenty years to accept himself, spent partly alone, on his boat, before traveling the world and discovering Greenland in 2007.
In the image, Frank Bruno walks with ease, a large black bucket loaded with pieces of ice on his shoulder, facing a landscape that magnetizes: the mineral moor, partially covered with lichen, opens onto the immense, littered sea of blue icebergs; the darker masses, which emerge from the waters, are whales.
Throughout his monologues, sometimes a little definitive or conventional – “Silence gives you answers”, “There is no point in shining if you don’t enlighten anyone” -, always in front of sublime landscapes, the different phases can be guessed of his resilience – without him using this word –, as if the film constituted a final stage.
In terms of form, he dares to use a flashback, uncommon in documentaries. Basically, he walks on his favorite themes: the anger that he keeps within himself, the solitude that he must be wary of and the freedom that he has always favored, even if it means hurting. “How many people have I left on a platform for my damn freedom? People who loved me. Because I am free and selfish. » It could well be that he evolves on this last point.