Dream me to the Moon

—

After the first per­son in space, Yuri Gagarin — that was exact­ly 60 years ago, a huge, aging social build­ing in the Paris sub­urb is named, which gives Fan­ny Liatard’s film its name: GAGARINE. The 16-year-old boy Yuri (Alseni Bathili) lives and works here, at least in his imag­i­na­tion he is a future astro­naut and he is the self-appoint­ed care­tak­er of the res­i­den­tial com­plex. Even if his life is by no means easy, he feels very much at home here. He owns a tele­scope and a self-made mod­el of the solar sys­tem hangs in his room. The tele­scope is not only used for stargaz­ing, Yuri also looks at the peo­ple in the neigh­bor­hood. He has set up a kind of work­shop and liv­ing room on the roof. From there, he can lis­ten into the res­i­dents’ apart­ments through the ven­ti­la­tion sys­tems. It is his secret retreat where he also thinks of his mom who is unable to look after him and who does­n’t answer his calls.

Yuri tries to keep the set­tle­ment, which is lit­tered and full of junk, in good con­di­tion with a lot of imag­i­na­tion, because it is actu­al­ly sup­posed to be demol­ished soon and many res­i­dents are already mov­ing out. With his young neigh­bor Diana (Lyna Khoudri), whom he likes very much, and the small deal­er Hous­sam (Jamil McCar­ven), Yuri expe­ri­ences things that are actu­al­ly expe­ri­enced at this age, but the demo­li­tion threat­ens to tear them all away from their homes. Yuri has a great idea: Could­n’t you con­vert the apart­ment block into a space­ship and just fly away? And sud­den­ly we dis­cov­er traces of a love and a com­ing-of-age film …

GAGARINE is the fea­ture film debut of the French film direc­tor Fan­ny Liatard. She released a 16-minute short film ver­sion in 2015. The fea­ture film was in the Cannes selec­tion for 2020, that fes­ti­val that was can­celed due to the pan­dem­ic. It then had its real pre­miere at the Zurich Film Fes­ti­val in Sep­tem­ber 2020.

Fan­ny Liatard has suc­ceed­ed in mak­ing a film in a place that is oth­er­wise asso­ci­at­ed with dra­ma, hope­less­ness, fear of the future and vio­lence, but which indeed tells of hope, future and con­fi­dence. The film intro­duces some young peo­ple who take their life into their own hands, shape it them­selves, and who believe in their own future.

One of the most beau­ti­ful scenes in the film shows the diverse res­i­dents of the set­tle­ment watch­ing a solar eclipse togeth­er through a tar­pau­lin orga­nized by Yuri. Every­one comes to rest and in the chat­ty, live­ly, rest­less dis­trict there is silence for a moment, and every­one for a moment for­gets the con­flicts and every­day prob­lems.

Yuri’s neigh­bor Diana once said: “If peo­ple don’t speak the same lan­guage, they beat each oth­er up.” Per­haps that’s naive, but we actu­al­ly know that such young peo­ple are liv­ing in the Parisian ban­lieus, as well as in Ger­man, Amer­i­can or British social hous­ing estates. We see young boys and girls who have hope, who pay atten­tion to their fel­low human beings, who want to shape their own future and who have the nec­es­sary opti­mism. And maybe these young peo­ple in par­tic­u­lar need a bet­ter hear­ing, and maybe we need to tell the sto­ries of these young peo­ple a lot more. Thanks to Fan­ny Liatard for doing this with this won­der­ful, imag­i­na­tive-real­is­tic, enthu­si­as­tic, rous­ing debut film — thanks also for the sur­pris­ing, won­der­ful, melan­choly sound­track and the excel­lent young cast.

GAGARINE
Cast: Alséni Bathi­ly, Jamil McCraven, Lyna Khoudri
Direc­tor: Fan­ny Liatard

The 14th LICHTER-FILMFEST FRANKFURT shows GAGARINE online until May 2, 2021:
https://online.lichter-filmfest.de/film/gagarine/