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ARRAS 2021

Review: For a Fistful of Fries

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- Yves Hinant and Jean Libon explore the underbelly of society with a fascinating police investigation, combining implacable realism and benevolent humanism beyond social determinism

Review: For a Fistful of Fries
Jean-Michel Lemoine in For a Fistful of Fries

"I try to understand, I listen to you, I observe, I hear the others, and I am obliged to put things one behind the other and understand what happened that night." After the scathing So Help Me God [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Jean Libon and Yves Hinant
film profile
]
(in competition at San Sebastián in 2017 and César 2019 for Best Documentary), it is on the side of a police investigation that the Belgian duo Yves Hinant - Jean Libon has chosen this time to focus their gaze, methodically laying bare social misery without ever obscuring its share of humanity, nor renouncing benevolence, but without forbidding themselves the humour of the tragic and the everyday. For, as one of the protagonists of the affair fatalistically concedes, "that's the way the world is" in the documentary For a Fistful of Fries [+see also:
trailer
interview: Jean Libon and Yves Hinant
film profile
]
, presented in the European Discoveries section of the 22nd Arras Film Festival.

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"In the victim's food bowl there are fries, some of which are practically intact";
"- If she has fries, I gave her fries, so.
- Belgium is the land of fries, I'm not going to be satisfied with a statement like that. She's got your fries in her belly
- Oh right
- She hasn't got fries in her house, not a single one. What struck me was the calibre of the fries, they were precisely the same, at the autopsy, it was eye-opening."
A woman was murdered in her home with a knife and the team of the criminal brigade led by the commissioner Jean-Michel Lemoine investigates. The main suspect? Alain, a drug addict, neighbour and former companion of the victim, a 37 year old man, 16 of whom spent time in prison, who has the profile of the ideal culprit because his emotional denials ("if I had killed her, I would remember it!") are drowned in abysses of confusion and comatose memory pierced by drugs. Very patient interrogations, hearings of possible witnesses, search for clues in the building where the murder took place, analysis of video recordings of the neighbourhood, confrontations of hypotheses between the police officers and the judge Anne Gruwez (in a secondary role this time compared to the directors' previous documentary, but still truculent: "I'm not prepared to bet that this guy had nothing to do with it, but shit, shit and shit, it's stalling and that's getting on my nerves"): doubt is instilled and the investigation evolves in several directions...

Beyond its purely detective thread, in the increasingly fascinating and surprising details of the investigation, For a Fistful of Fries brings out, with great finesse and spontaneity, a striking portrait of the underclass of contemporary globalised metropolises (destitution, drugs, methadone, migrants crammed into rooms, petty trafficking, outbreaks of violence, etc.). A double-ended picture that the filmmakers very gradually sketch out in black and white, a bit like a deprived world that has lost all its colours and is haunted by modern "Miserables" that the investigators insist on respecting with humanity (which does not exclude cunning) despite all the negative appearances. For as Victor Hugo wrote in the closing quote of the film: "Those who live are those who struggle. The others, I pity".

Produced by Le Bureau and Chez Georges ProductionsFor a Fistful of Fries was co-produced by Artemis Productions and the RTBF. Distribution in French cinemas will be handled by Apollo Films and international sales are led by The Bureau Sales.

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(Translated from French by Manuela Lazic)

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