A few years ago, the director Frédéric Laffont himself was unaware of this chapter of French history. In the 1960s and 1970s, France recruited 80,000 Moroccans, young and illiterate, to work at low cost in the mines of the North and Lorraine. “Life in front of us”, presented at Fipadoc 2022, subtly recounts the poignant life of these miners who “gave life to 600,000 French people”. A story as little known as it is essential to understanding today’s society.
RFI : Why tell today this story that for a long time nobody considered interesting ?
Frederic Laffont : It is a story that I discovered thanks to the publication of two double pages in the newspaper Le Monde around the story of Félix Mora, a man who recruited in the 1960s and 1970s almost 80,000 Moroccans in the south of Morocco. , Berbers from the countryside, to close the mines in France.
► Read also : Fipadoc Grand Prix: “Telling about Darfur, with Marie-José Tubiana, 91 years old”
Félix Mora was a former soldier who became an executive of the Houillères du Nord-Pas-de-Calais and head of the foreign labor service in this region. In your documentary, a historian calls it “ the Houillères slave ship “. Was it a justified nickname for what happened with Moroccan immigrants in the 1960s and 1970s ?
I don’t think that definition is at all appropriate, for the simple reason that the 80,000 men who left in the 1960s and 1970s were all absolutely voluntary. They were fleeing poverty, they were doing it for their own. When Felix Mora arrived in the villages of southern Morocco, it was with the support and approval of the Moroccan and French authorities. In his suitcases were Moroccan passports, and France welcomed these workers with open arms. There were sometimes 1.5 mile queues of men going through very harsh medical examinations. In this these images remind us of other really terrible images which could justify this word “slave trader”, except that these men are very voluntary. And when Mora puts a green or red stamp on their skin – another sad image from the past – those with the green stamp then leave for France, and those with a red stamp must stay in the country. The infamy is to stay in Morocco and not go to France. Beyond my own judgment, what seems important to me is how these men talk about this day themselves. They were fully aware of what they were going through, but they were very convinced that their choices were good for them and their families.
Beyond Félix Mora, we discover in the film one of the Moroccans who left very young, but also his daughter, born later in France, who became a Frenchwoman of Moroccan origin. Is it a movie about the father or the daughter ?
It’s a film that I had the concern to write in the present. It is about knowing how 80,000 men arrived for twenty years in France in the most legal way and give birth to children and grandchildren. How 80,000 Moroccans give 600,000 French? People whose story we absolutely do not know, a story often not even told in families.
The figure of Félix Mora is quite secondary in my film. If he hadn’t done this work, someone else would have done it. It is also the story of an era. After the closure of the mines, these Moroccan workers go to the car factories. They witnessed all the endings of the Trente Glorieuses in France, the end of French industry. My concern was to see how these fathers, one of whose selection criteria was not being able to read and write, could give birth today to children who have all had very brilliant higher education.
► To read also: Fipadoc: “Shadow Game”, the “game” of young migrants from Africa and Asia to cross borders
This whole story begins with a medical examination in Morocco. The most striking scene of the film is certainly the moment when the candidate workers are branded like slaves with a stamp on their chest. What struck you the most while making this documentary? ?
The thing that struck me the most is that I didn’t film more men than those who are in the film. These are men who were often exposed to silicone. They were very afraid to speak at a time when everyone was masked because of the Covid. And everyone tells me: I have nothing to say. For me, this is the most important point. It’s not a TV cast of extremely fluent characters saying conventional immigration talk. They have a unique word. End to end, these seven people, workers, a mother, two family children, make a choral song that is much bigger than them. I find it magnificent, because never heard. These people simply respond, very modestly in their own way by saying “I” in the most beautiful way. They are truly making declarations of love to our country as we have never heard them.
At the start of their trip, they are afraid to get on the boat to cross the Mediterranean, to leave for a totally unknown country whose language they do not speak. To ward off their anxieties, a sentence guides them : “ We thought the life in front of us “. What was their dream ?
The life ahead of us is the title of our film, an absolutely magnificent phrase. Their dream? I don’t even know if it was a dream. It was just a time when it was necessary to feed the parents who remained behind. At first, they left for eighteen months, with renewable contracts, which were not contracts for Polish, Yugoslav, Italian and French miners who were still working at the time. Moroccans had a status below the others. Very quickly, when you descend for the first time into the mine several hundred meters underground, the dream quickly turns into a nightmare. But precisely, the voice of these men is in the greatest dignity not to have an agreed word on all that one imagines on the harshness of life. They turned this ordeal into a dream come true, because the children are there and they have been brought up well. This creates lives of extreme dignity.
► Read also : Natyvel Pontalier documented his initiation in Gabon: “the camera should film the spirits”
When they go down to the mines, the workers have no name, just a number. Fifty years later, they know what they have sacrificed, at the same time, they have absolutely no complaints. They proudly claim : “ all our children have succeeded “. Is it a success story Moroccan style in France ?
On the very small scale of the film and some people, it is indisputably a success story. This is where I wonder a lot. As soon as we are interested in them, they say that they have nothing to say, in the sense: “our life is without interest”. And we get the testimonies that we can discover in the film.