All her summers as a teenager, Alix Douart Sinnouretty spent them at the reception center for French people from Indochina (CAFI), north and away from Sainte-Livrade-sur-Lot, not far from Agen. When a fire broke out at the end of 2005, there was first talk of a renovation before the town hall decided to destroy the place. Why does her mother invest so much in preventing the disappearance of what was then a vacation spot for Alix? The young woman leads the investigation and unearths the painful history of her family, at the same time as she traces the history of the colonization and decolonization of Indochina.
“I found my place in the small story and also in the big one,” affirms the documentary filmmaker at the end of her dizzying story, the fruit of her university work (in law) and a patient immersion in archives. Those, personal, of his family; and those, historical, of the departmental fund on the CAFI of Aix-en-Provence. Vietnam-sur-Lot is the place where around 1,200 French people from Indochina – half of whom were children – were repatriated from April 1956, two years after Dien Bien Phu, the last major battle of the war. of Indochina which marked the fall of French colonial power.
Camp indigent
It’s where his mother, Nina Sinnouretty, arrived and grew up, where his family sustained itself for decades. This is where Alix spent all her summers in the 2000s. In this destitute camp – no heating, no bathroom, no insulation – which was supposed to be temporary and which remained under military (colonial) administration. ) until the 1980s. It was then gradually abandoned by the public authorities, pending its desertion, before being partly renovated into social housing. Today, the place could accommodate a war museum, completely disconnected from those who inhabited it, as an additional injunction to the erasure of the history of Indochina.
The documentarian gives the witnesses of this colonial past a voice, with the help of historians Alain Ruscio, Michel Bodin, the anthropologist Dominique Rolland, author of Petits Viet-Nams (Elytis Editions, 2010), and archivists. With some literary qualities and sober production, it displaces the usual points of view and questions about Indochinese colonization and tells a story little seen, little listened to, little taught, buried by repression and by the residual burden of institutional racism, with its ordinary procession of humiliations.
At the end of the road to repair, appeasement awaits. The fact remains that the challenges of saving this place of life, of interbreeding, of memory, this unique “country” in the world, remain intact, buried in the persistent repression of the colonial fact.
