Downloaded from YTS.MX
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
Christine had very pale skin and your father's eyes.
She looked a lot like your father. Girls tend to look like their dad.
She was very cute.
She could walk, she was very affectionate.
If she saw me getting up to go sit somewhere,
because she did not speak early, probably around four years old,
not even four years old.
She would kiss my legs.
And so, Mum, what was her problem?
She didn't cry at birth,
because she had a heart murmur.
We had to have it removed, otherwise...
It happened to her when she was six months old.
I was bottle-feeding her,
and she turned black like your satchel over there.
So I grabbed her by the...
I grabbed her by the legs and I spanked her.
I flipped her back, and she was all pink again.
So immediately,
I took her to the hospital for children,
where they told me my daughter needed an operation,
that they would give me two bottles of oxygen
and that she'd need an oxygen bell to sleep at night.
Auntie Jo lived at the Oasis, so everything happened there.
When you saw her dead, where was she?
In her bed.
Her head wasn't facing me but the other way.
I took her hand and I told my aunt Catherine,
that's why I wanted to be called Catherine,
"Look, she's moving, it's not true, she's not dead !"
Her head was on the side like this, her little hand hanging.
- You found her in her bedroom? - Yes, in her little bed.
How long had she been dead?
She had died during the night.
Her heart gave up.
Strangely enough, you did not keep any photo.
I did not want photos.
I put Christine's photo on her grave, it was white with white pebbles.
I did not want any, I burnt them.
- I burnt the films, everything. - You didn't keep a single photo?
I burnt everything.
I had a camera to film her.
I even gave the camera to Véronique.
I didn't want to keep it.
But you see, it was this type of camera.
We were very lucky, we earned good money.
Isn't it strange to burn everything?
You always keep pictures of your children.
Yes, but not me. It’s all in the past.
What can you do with a photo? Cry over it?
We had cried enough for my mother.
My parents got married in the late 50s in Casablanca.
Watching these pictures, I feel like I am meeting them for the first time.
Looking carefree as I would never know them to be.
I can only observe the attitude of a man and a woman
who are about to live a huge trauma,
and don’t know it yet.
Here, my parents haven't had their daughter yet,
they haven't lost her yet.
My father filmed that child in the early 60s.
But those films are missing.
I also filmed my own child, not knowing any of this story.
These pictures of my son reflect the absent pictures of my sister
and the truth of a hidden story.
It all started in a cemetery in Switzerland I went to with a friend.
As I walked down the aisles, I stopped in the children's section.
I was suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of sadness.
WHEN YOU FLY OVER THIS GRAVE, WARBLER,
SING YOUR SWEETEST SONG FOR THIS CHILD
A sadness I couldn't explain.
It wasn't in childhood, but as a teenager
that I first heard of Christine.
Of the fact that she died of the blue baby syndrome.
But we didn't know...
We didn't know the exact circumstances of her death,
where she died.
Why did our parents never talk about the past?
Maybe they were uncomfortable with their personal history.
Weren’t they denying being born in Morocco, in Casablanca?
Also their parents emigrating from Spain to Morocco.
Their humble background...
We've only very recently learnt Mum's real date of birth.
She always mentioned July, when she was born in December.
Same with her first name.
We never called her Angela when we were kids.
She changed names several times.
As a child, we called her Germaine,
when we moved to Rouen, she became Catherine.
Her friends in Rouen call her Catherine.
We don't even know where that name comes from.
We didn’t know her birth date, her real first name...
She reinvents herself, she tells herself a story.
And she tells us a story which is not our story.
I find our family record book.
I notice my parents' names were clumsily modified.
Gilberto had become Gilbert and Angela, Angele.
In the children's section, Christine is the first to be listed.
Her name is covered with a brown mark.
That mark bled onto the page opposite and covers my own name.
I check my parents' old passports.
I notice that on 24th of September 1963, the day my sister died,
there are several stamps.
My mother flew from Orly to Casablanca.
My father left Algiers for Casablanca.
I discover they weren't with the child when she died.
Why not?
It is not the first time I'm facing questions with no answers.
Just like when my uncle suddenly disappeared.
Francisco was my mum's brother.
He was estranged from his family and lived with us.
The years we spent together have left me sweet feelings.
Until that holiday in Mallorca.
One evening, on the beach, my mum told me he had a boating accident.
That he nearly died and was in hospital in an iron lung.
I remember coming back from school in that gloomy fall of 1974,
seeing my mother in tears, I did not understand.
As months went by, his room slowly turned into a storeroom.
Soon, we stopped talking about him.
Years later, I learnt he died on the day he had his accident,
in Mallorca.
I start researching the blue baby,
the heart deformity my parents always mentioned about Christine.
I realize that most babies suffering from the syndrome
tend to have chromosome anomalies, like Down syndrome.
Did they realize immediately Christine had a problem?
Not at all.
They realized that when I pointed at the fact she was turning blue.
Didn't you notice anything when she was born?
She was cute, she was a beautiful child.
She didn't have any hair, like you or Olivier.
She was blonde, her hair grew much later.
And she had goldilocks.
Like any beautiful little boy or girl.
It's like that!
I don’t like that questioning.
We never talked about that child.
We thought we were only four,
two parents, two children.
I always told you there were three of you,
but I never showed you photos of her.
What would have it changed?
If you didn't see this plant tomorrow,
you haven't seen it being born,
it's the same thing for my little Christine.
Her name was Christine Marie Françoise.
Marie was Gilbert's mum's name.
And I named her Françoise after...
And then my sister named her daughter Françoise.
There you are.
My sister had her child and...
I was treating her like my daughter.
That's it.
And that’s not good.
Christine wasn't completely normal.
Yes, she was.
She was normal, she spoke.
If she didn't say "Mummy", "Daddy", "glass", "bottle"...
she would go get her bottle.
If she hadn't been normal, I don't know...
Why do you say that?
The doctor would have told me, I would have had a medical report.
Eric, it's her heart that wasn't normal.
We had to operate on it.
They tried twice at the Trousseau Hospital, unsuccessfully.
Didn't she have Down syndrome?
- What? - Didn't she have Down syndrome?
No, no!
On the contrary!
At some point, I said she wasn't, because she was completely...
People pointed at her bad heart, asking me how she could jump.
And they put her on oxygen.
It was a different girl.
If she had had that thing, she might have lived. You never know.
- Did you ever visit her grave? - Never.
Nor my parents'.
Nor my grand-mother's, whom I loved, or my grand-father's,
- and they brought us up. - Wouldn't you like it?
No. What would I find there?
What might the Moroccans have done with the French cemetery?
My mother's grave is in marble.
My grand-parents' aren't.
It is just a cross, like we used to do.
Do you know in which cemetery Christine is buried?
Excuse me?
Do you know in which cemetery Christine is buried?
The French cemetery in Casablanca, there's only one.
You say there is a picture of her on her grave?
Yes, with the poem about the warbler.
I know very little about my parents' life in Morocco.
I know my grand-parents came from Spain in 1912,
probably aboard one of those huge ships fleeing poverty.
I know my parents were born in 1935 with dual citizenship.
My grand-father became a renowned bootmaker in Casablanca.
I know my parents met in the early 1950s.
Then, I find these 8mm films that I try to decode
and to cross-reference with the bigger story.
None of the events that happened so far in Morocco
had ever reached the violence and horror of August 20.
This is 1954, one year before the Independence.
At that time, the inequality gap was widening.
The Moroccan people had never been so oppressed
Yet, in these pictures,
it seems this little community was living outside the world.
In 1960, my parents welcomed their first child, Christine.
Not long after, they moved to Algiers because of my father’s job.
From that point on, there are no more 8mm films.
In July 1962, Algeria's independence was recognized.
My parents moved back to Morocco and the family house.
This is where the family record book says Christine died
on 24th September 1963.
Straight after her death, my parents abandoned Morocco for France
where my brother and I were born.
With the burial plot certificate, I ask the caretaker
of the Ben M'Sik Cemetery to lead me to plot 35.
There is no plot 35.
We cannot find Christine's grave.
I look for my grand-parents' vault.
My mum told me they were not far apart.
WARBLER, WHEN YOU TOUCH DOWN THIS GRAVE,
TELL HER THAT EVERY DAY THAT ENDS GETS US CLOSER TO HER
On the little marble book, her photo is missing.
I picture my mum on the day of her daughter's funeral.
I think of Giuliana, the character from Laurent Gaudé's Gates of Hell.
"I cursed the undertakers who carried my child's coffin
"with relief, because within themselves,
"they couldn't help but think it was light,
"thus less tiring for them.
"I cursed the people in the crowd I didn't know.
"I also cursed my friends and their sincere tears.
"All the pain that isn't mine, I spat on it.
"In a moment like this, there is only room for the tears of a mother.
"Everything else is obscene.
"May be cursed this gravestone I haven't chosen
"and that now covers my child for eternity.
"I'll never come back here, I'll never lay a wreath on it.
"I'll never water any flowers, nor will I ever pray.
"There won't be any remembrance,
"I won't talk to this stone face down with the resignation of war widows.
"I'll never come back, because there is nothing here."
My parents have never visited this grave.
How come it has been tended to?
The caretaker tells me a woman visited it regularly.
I ask him if he can contact her.
He tells me to come back a few days later.
I walk the streets of Casablanca.
I find the church where my parents got married.
The steps and red brick lattice work from the 8mm film are still there
Round a corner, the disused slaughterhouse still stands.
A little more than 100 years of French history
have made this territory that was abandoned for centuries
a land flowing with harvests that enthrals the travellers.
The spectacle of this organised abundance
that covers all areas
can make proud the nation that conceived it,
wanted it, built it.
But France could not forget Man himself.
By giving to the country the means to prosper,
it has also given its people the means to defend themselves
against the misery of their often-endangered health.
Providing education was equally useful.
It's for this purpose that various schools opened across the country.
But France did not stop there.
France has given the chances of a modern education,
and to the children, based on individual merit,
access to the highest positions.
But our democratic nation has not forgotten either
to call them to manage their country with the new order and prosperity.
By imposing domestic peace and civilized human relations,
by lifting all the archaic barriers in exchange and contact,
France has from the offset created a climate for fruitful cooperation.
This fruitful cooperation only exists in the newsreels from the time.
Some slogans are able to recycle a past made of war crimes,
dispossession and massacres.
For years, the independence wars were a blank page in our national history.
Suppressing that memory has eaten up the French society,
and the Moroccan and Algerian as well.
How do we talk about these wars with no name?
These wars we have decided to call "events".
At the end of these wars, in order to grant impunity,
we prescribed a culture of oblivion.
We pretended there was no use in looking back into the past.
We pretended it was important to move on.
It may be the same thing with family histories,
when children simply can’t ask parents any questions.
The child I was, governed by the fear of triggering a disaster,
did not dare to ask questions.
When I return to plot 35 a few days later,
I am told the woman who tend to my sister's grave lives in Spain.
They give me her number, so I call her.
When Mum died, we buried her there,
and I saw the grave of that little girl,
with the little photo, everything was impeccable.
When I came back, maybe two or three months later,
the grave had been vandalised.
The photo was gone, everything was gone and broken.
I was filled with anger.
I put everything back in place.
I tidied up, I made a little flower bed for her.
Then I just automatically, naturally, tended
to that grave as if it was my own daughter's.
And so there was nothing left? Christine's photo was gone?
No, sadly.
Sadly. But you must have photos!
- No, that's why I'm asking. - Hasn't your mum given you any?
- No, that's why. - How come?
- What was the photo like? - It was oval.
And the little girl in the photo was very sweet.
She had long blonde hair and deep blue eyes.
It has been so long, she is now part of myself.
I also talk to her.
Just like I talk to my mum.
There you are.
Many times, I pictured myself standing by my sister's grave.
Many times, I contemplated bringing her body back to France.
Today, I realize it is a need I have to make her story mine,
to access it.
Now, I know the story lies here, in Casablanca.
It does not belong anywhere else.
Do you remember Morocco?
Do you remember your childhood, anything?
Of course.
Does it follow you?
It follows me, obviously.
My parents were Spanish.
We had a happy childhood.
Earlier on, Mum talked about three children.
Who was the third one?
Who was she talking about?
Three? She was talking about...
About our little girl.
Our little girl who died.
She was very young.
And it scarred your mum.
It really scarred her.
That's it.
What else?
It also scarred you, didn't it?
- What? - It scarred you as well!
Of course, it scarred me.
How could it not?
Do you remember her? Could you describe her face?
Yes.
Well, describing her is...
She was an adorable little girl, she was just four...
She was four months old.
Was she?
She was still very young.
She wasn't four months old, she was three years old.
She was...
She was three years old. When she died, how old was she?
When she died, she was four...
She was four months old.
Can you tell me what really happened with that child?
We...
She suffered from Down syndrome.
And that affected Mum a lot.
It is the centre of the issue.
There you are.
It was a mistake. Probably.
Anyway...
It's all in the past.
So...
On the same evening, I listen to my son's breathing as he sleeps.
I picture my parents looking over his cradle after his birth.
I can feel their anxieties, their worries.
I recall the panic that overwhelmed me during the first echography.
I kept asking the doctor if he found anything abnormal.
For days, my mum refused to accept my son was named Baltasar.
She called him François,
the French version of her brother who drowned and of her father.
She told everyone around her that François was born.
I keep thinking about a touching book by photographer Siân Davey.
A book I had lost and looked everywhere for a new copy.
A book about her daughter affected by Down syndrome.
I didn't know it yet, but somehow, someone inside me had guessed.
Did you also fear we wouldn't be normal?
No one was abnormal.
Abnormal children are children who can’t walk, who dribble.
I don't know, what do you call "not normal"?
An idiot? A simple mind? It wasn't the case.
That's all I have to say.
It brought a lot of suffering,
because a fragile child requires a lot of care.
Even a child.
Do you have any regrets about Christine?
Regrets about Christine? No.
No. The good Lord took her away. What can I do?
Do I have regrets?
I don't know. I don't understand.
I am trying to understand my mother's denial.
In her days, having a Down syndrome child was probably viewed
as an insurmountable shame for a person and a family.
Psychoanalytic books I read tell that heavily disabled children
always end up being the object of an unconscious death wish.
This death wish on the disabled has always existed.
These Nazi propaganda pictures recall the beginnings of silent film era.
But here, the captions read words to chill one to the bones.
IT IS ONLY CHARITY TO DELIVER THOSE ONE CAN'T CURE
Yet, these children seem to point
at our ability to accept others,
and to claim their lives
are worth living.
On the morning of September 7, 2013,
nearly 50 years to the day after Christine's death,
I got a phone call from the hospital to tell me my father had passed.
As a nod to his past, his room overlooked a palm tree.
It may be the last thing my father saw before he slipped away,
a palm tree from his native Morocco.
I don't know why, but once I found myself on my own with him,
I filmed him one last time.
As a gesture to repel death.
Or maybe the destruction of the pictures of my sister
pushed me to film pictures that are just as taboo.
In the aisles of the National Centre of Cinematography,
thousands of films decompose slowly,
despite all the preservation measures.
Here, chemists resuscitate films that time has damaged.
For some reels that are beyond repair,
a single frame can help identify and archive the film.
It’s not the notion of disappearance that comes out of these pictures,
but to something else.
There is something about life.
A strength that carries on living through the images.
I only need to look at these pictures in motion
for the people printed on them to retrieve their existence.
Things are sometimes closer, more accessible than we think.
During a family reunion in the suburbs of Paris,
my cousin Jean-François tells me my sister had lived with them
in their house in the Oasis neighbourhood in Casablanca.
He was 10 years old.
I would come back from school around 4.30, 5 pm.
She would be having a snack with my mother
and my grand-mother who lived in Tangiers.
She always had a radiant smile.
And I would try to do things to disconnect her
from reality, if I may say.
I would give her a little duck that my father had bought me,
it was the Disney frenzy at the time,
and he had bought me a Donald Duck toy.
And I would imitate Donald,
making the noises.
She loved it, she was having a blast. She had such a laughter!
It was tinkling, infectious, to die for.
It was a change for her.
She would forget all about the forceful snack time.
And then, she'd eat naturally, it was much easier.
I have very clear memories of her, it's funny.
It was on a Friday night at the end of the week.
And it was full house, as often.
Christine's cradle was in the parents' bedroom,
and I realized she didn't have the duck toy,
so I grabbed it.
I went into the bedroom, I walked in there and I put the duck
by the bed, next to it.
I went to move her a bit,
but I did not feel much reaction,
I thought it was strange, she was a little cold.
But she had a smile, her face was very peaceful.
I just thought she was sleeping.
Her face was like that.
But still, I went to see Mum, I got out of their bedroom,
and Mum, or Auntie Jo, your aunt, my mother,
asked me what I was doing in the bedroom.
I replied Christine looked a bit strange.
So she went to see.
And that's how it happened.
It brings me back to it.
That's me, the dog, and the infamous window.
It's in that room that I found Christine.
According to you, who wanted to hide her disability?
I think it was your mother.
Not your father, because he was...
Under his brusque shell,
he was a very sensitive man, as you know.
But your mother has a very strong character.
She is very sweet, very nice, but she has a strong character.
Very much, and so,
she made the decision to make a clean break
and to start her entire life afresh.
I now understand all the visa stamps on the passports.
I can put the story back together.
For nine months, my mum thought she was expecting a normal child.
At birth, the doctors tell my parents the child is 'mongoloid'.
They might not have understood immediately what it meant.
But there is already a shame attached to it.
A month later, they leave Casablanca for Algiers,
far from the family, the neighbours and others.
My mum found herself isolated, my father being often away for work.
She looked after her daughter who is constantly at risk of suffocation.
The country was ablaze.
Maybe she thought the child would end up growing normally,
that things would get better.
But suddenly, Christine was 3,
she didn't talk yet, she went into fits.
Her disability is obvious.
My mum couldn’t carry on pretending she didn’t see it.
The Algerian war forced them to come back to Morocco.
Very soon, they decided to leave North Africa to settle in France.
But there again, my parents were foreigners, immigrants.
They struggled to integrate.
How could they rebuild their lives, find a job?
Christine was spending more and more time in hospital.
My mum sat by her side day and night.
With the exhaustion, she broke down.
She then decided to send her daughter away.
She went back to Casablanca,
entrusted the kid to her older sister and returned to France alone.
Six months later, Jean-François found Christine in her cradle.
A child has died at the same time as the colonial civilization.
All must be forgotten, the pain must be overcome, a new life must start.
My parents erased all traces of Christine,
thus burying the secret of their past life.
A few years later, my brother and I were born.
Rennes, Marseille, Aix-en-Provence,
Fontenay-sous-Bois, Amboise, Rouen,
we were four nomads, always being displaced by my father's work.
We were brought up as model children.
We learned the piano, attended Sunday school, played tennis.
But obviously, there was something else.
I lived and we all lived with a ghost.
A ghost transmitted from a parent's subconscious to that of their child.
What I remember is that it was 12.45,
and at 2 pm, they all became agitated.
My aunt took the four of us apart,
and told us: "Go kiss your mother, she is asleep."
So we kissed her, and they made us leave the room.
They asked your aunt Rosie
to take us to my grandmother’s, who lived nearby.
About half an hour away.
You were eight years old?
It was Christmas eve, on December 24th.
And you were told your mum was asleep?
Yes, we were told: "She's asleep, give her a kiss."
And you didn't go to her funeral?
No, I didn't.
I only learned at 13 she had died, when I went to the hospital.
I couldn't know, we were told she was in hospital.
That was it, she was in hospital and we had to behave.
We saw my grand-father coming back home a week after.
We stayed at my grand-mother's for Christmas and New Year
with toys my aunt had bought, a stroller...
A wooden stroller, the little rag doll.
And all the rest.
So when did you really hear about her passing?
I learned she had really died when we went to the hospital.
We confronted Jo and Isabelle, we told them they had lied to us,
that we had found in her bed a woman of a different colour.
We had found an African lady.
Why do you think they concealed her death from you?
Go figure.
We were not the adults.
We were children. Don't ask, don't tell, it was like that.
They didn't want to torment us, I guess, but they didn't mean ill.
But they hurt us, because we were looking for her everywhere.
She was pregnant.
She was five months in.
When she died, the baby was still moving inside.
That's what my sisters said.
Would you rather they told you the truth?
Of course!
Yes. And I have always taught you not to lie.
Even if there is a price to pay, you have to.
That's what it is.
And it is very painful.
We kept calling for Mum, but she wouldn't come.
Just like I call Gilbert, but he's not there.
My mum wanted to forget her child, just like the land of North Africa
and her life spent in Casablanca,
to never come back.
The same words as my dad's: it's all in the past.
In the house in Oasis, where the whole story started,
I eventually find what I was looking for.
Naïma, the new owner, used to work for our family.
She has held onto keepsakes.
At the back of a photograph, I recognize my mum's handwriting
identifying Christine as the little girl.
To François Dupeyron
Special thanks to Bernard Eisenschitz
Subtitling by Vdm - Paris