In November 2018, the curators of the show Nous, saisonniers,
saisonnières… Genève 1931–2019 put out a call for projects. They were
looking for an original proposal to create a series of portraits of former
guest workers. I sensed their desire to record authentic testimonies with
a film concept of some kind. Passing on the story of these guest workers’
lives to their children and grandchildren was another important point
for them that likewise holds special interest for me. It was while I was
reading Édouard Louis’s Qui a tué mon père [Who Killed My Father, 2018]
that the idea of doing Lettres ouvertes [Open Letters] came to me. Louis’s
book deals with a subject that is different yet similar, i.e., how politics
destroys human bodies. The text is a monologue addressed to the author’s
father, which could have just as easily assumed the form of a letter. In
both cases, the person who is addressed is taken hostage and cannot
defend themselves. The addressee is appealed to as much as the author.
There exists an invisible confrontation between the two parties. They
coexist in the time it takes to read the letter, love, pardon, blame and
tease each other, and reveal secrets…
So I based my proposal on the principle of the open letter. It’s intimate
in its form and political in its content. I found all these elements very
stimulating from a reflexive, cinematographic point of view. With each
of the protagonists before filming, we had long conversations about
their years as guest workers or as a child and what came after. Then we
looked at who the letter would be addressed to. Each of the participants
wrote an initial version; next I worked with them to eventually come up
with a final version, taking on the role of a copy-editor a bit, notably to get
over the language barrier for some of them and put into words the major
events and strong emotions. I was very touched by what they revealed of
their lives as guest workers and more generally as immigrants. To each
I proposed a symbolic site where they would read their letter, a site that
would highlight key elements of their experience. Personal archives, as
well as those of RTS [Swiss radio and television], helped to flesh out each
portrait. That also offers us the chance to discover in a different light the
little-known lives of individuals who arrived in Switzerland with an
A Permit and who are the players in this story.