Le pays à l’envers

A personal journey in slave memory in the heart of Guadeloupe Returning to the island her father left 50 years earlier, the filmmaker goes back in time to retrace the history of her name. In the course of this initiatory journey on the land of her father's childhood, her investigation takes us back to the time of slavery. In the archives, in the Creole gardens or the ruins of the sugar factories, the paths of a living memory cross the vision of a country where stories, bodies, music, speak with force of a history that still resonates. The film is composed like a Creole garden, in the abundance of images and stories; it is attached to the land, interweaving intimate references and collective memory. With Michel Rogers, an inhabited genealogist, through the memories of the exiled father or in the footsteps of Léna Blou, an inspired choreographer and her young students, it deciphers the contemporary traces of slavery, and even of colonialism in general. At the bend of today's Guadeloupe, it holds up a mirror to so-called metropolitan France: it goes in search of the other side of the country.