“We are one people.” This statement, central to Alice Diop’s film, was issued in 2015 by the French newspaper Libération following the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher supermarket. Examining this premise, whose presence haunts the film, the filmmaker presents a sociological documentary essay that follows the RER B, a railway line that links the northern and southern suburbs of Paris. Along the way, she collects the stories and testimonies of their inhabitants, who come from a diverse range of geographical and socioeconomic backgrounds. This polysemic exploration brings together the innumerable life paths of this so-called “peri-urban” France, from the filmmaker’s own family to a series of characters she encounters along her travels: a Malian mechanic living in his car, a group of hunting enthusiasts, the numerous pensioners whom her sister looks after, and even the writer Pierre Bergounioux. This arresting cinematic gesture serves as a political response to the absence of "little lives" on our screens, “drawing them out of the obscurity in which they had been buried”.
