Eve Duchemin’s new movie, Petit rempart, was unveiled in a world premiere within the Visions du Réel Festival’s Highlights line-up. The filmmaker notably made her name with her previous documentary, En bataille, portrait d’une directrice de prison, which was screened in numerous festivals and which won the Best Documentary Magritte in 2018. Her first fiction feature film, Time Out [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Eve Duchemin
scheda film], was released in 2022.

Petit rempart paints another portrait of a woman, in an immersive style. Mariem is 53. In another not-too-distant life, she was an estate agent working in luxury property. She lived a very comfortable life in a beautiful house in Namur, but it was also a life of violence with an abusive partner whom she left overnight. Mariem now finds herself on the street, as they say, and specifically in a refuge centre for isolated women, where she sets out on the long and winding road to find a new life for herself with at least a semblance of normality.

"It turns out you need to have a degree to be a homeless person", Mariem jokes. We follow her through the endless procedures involved in obtaining some kind of status, having left her home without any kind of personal documents but with a mortgage still weighing down upon her. She suddenly finds herself overwhelmed by the thought that she isn’t anyone anymore, not helped by the infantilisation she suffers in her dealings with the authorities processing her situation, and all the paperwork needing completion, not to mention the schedule and monitoring which characterise life in the refuge where she’s staying, and the sensation that she’s always on the verge of leaving. Her link to the outside world (other people, her children who are unaware of her situation, the administrative authorities, the bank) is her phone. But her life is on hold, as if she’s waiting for someone to speak to.

As the story advances, the filmmaker’s presence becomes more tangible. A genuine relationship develops between the two women, and the on-camera irruption of the director’s voice - we sense she’s very close to her protagonist - allows us to better share in the latter’s daily life. This trust mirrors the mutual support unfolding within the female community, where sorority prevails, even if distress and violence always seem to float back up to the surface. In all her misfortune, Mariem knows the price of her freedom and sees the suffering of those who are in far more precarious situations than she, for whom the refuge is a destination rather than a stepping stone. It’s a portrait made up of smaller details (the objects Mariem has kept from her old life: an iron, nutcrackers), buoyed by her unfailingly warm voice, and rich in the protagonist’s generosity as she reveals her temporarily messy, private world as she sets out on the road to a new life.

Petit rempart was produced by Kwassa Films with the support of the Wallonia Brussels Federation, RTBF, Centre Audiovisuel de Bruxelles (CBA), and the Tax Shelter initiative via Beside. Distribution in Belgium will fall to Screen Box.