Article Sud Ouest «Le Pays des enfants perdus »-651

“Le Pays des enfants perdus” produced by Flach Film and France 3, is a powerful work of fiction, the kind that marks opinion, breaks your heart and leaves you feeling a little ashamed. In the land of Voltaire and Hugo… The film is a stunning achievement. For the first time, it tells the story of a page of French history in the 1960s, a political, social and administrative debacle, a sad human adventure forgotten by most people…
Flashback: at the end of the 1960s, with the help of state officials, local mayors decided to bring children from the island of Reunion to repopulate the Creuse, a region of France that was suffering from mass depopulation at the time… Distressing and poignant, the story of Juliette and Isidore, an uprooted brother and sister, is never cloyingly sentimental…
The director, Francis Girod, says, “I wanted the film to be made for television because social cinema has a hard time finding a place in theatres these days. And at a time when people are talking about French fiction’s unwillingness to tackle such subjects, this film appears as the perfect counter-example… a melodramatic film in the best meaning of the term can teach people a thing or two… The film goes beyond the controversy. 40 years on, we are not here to judge. However, it can inspire a debate on a universal problem: cohabitation with people from other countries and cultures. To make our point, we have attempted to avoid the pitfalls of setting good against evil and have simply tried to adopt a humane approach without any bias…”