Breakfast with Les fantômes de l’usine

An interview with Brahim Fritah, director of Les fantômes de l’usine (Ghosts in the Factory)

 First of all, is Ghosts in the Factory based on a (or several) true story/stories? Is the script read by the voice-over an actual testimonial?

Ghosts in the Factory is partly autobiographical. The script read by the voice-over is inspired by the memories and personal reflections I have from my teenage years spent in the factory. But it is also a fictional script, especially when it comes to the ghosts, the workers, and the story which begins the film.

 So Ghosts in the Factory takes place in a factory… Was it planned from the beginning for the action to take place in that particular setting or did the factory gradually materialize during pre-production? And how did you choose the different film locations?

At the beginning of the project, I wrote and directed a feature-length autobiographical film called Chroniques d’une cour de récré, which came out in June 2013. My family and I lived in a factory where my father worked as a guard. The film evokes that period of my childhood in the 1980s. However, I wasn’t quite done with those memories.

The short film allowed me to explore another facet of that childhood spent among the working class in that factory, with a more poetic and almost fantastic, intimate perspective.

So yes, the factory was planned from the beginning and before finding the right factory, we had to visit over a hundred in the region around Paris. Having lived, played, worked in factories for my entire childhood, I had a very specific idea of what I wanted, the decors in the film, the ambiance and the different places in the factory that I had in mind: the courtyard, the storeroom, the administrative offices, the inside of the guard’s house where we lived.

 In Ghosts in the Factory, your main character spends his childhood working. During the making of the film, did you gather any information about the current state of working children? And for you in the film, were the children working legally? Were they enrolled in school? How do you explain that they were employed as minors?

When the main character is cleaning the factory offices, that is really me, but more between 14 and 18 years old. I worked after school, after 7 PM, as told in the film. I wasn’t forced by my parents, it was more the desire to help them out with the cleaning and to take advantage of those very particular and privileged moments when you are alone in the factory, in an adult world. I didn’t have to clean. Often, we would do a part of the cleaning and my parents would do the rest. In the film, I actually wanted to show an offbeat point of view of the blue-collar world, the point of view of a teenager who lived in the factory and who knew its every nook and cranny.

 The factory is the setting for the imaginary tales created by your main character. Through his words, he seems to fantasize about the pyramidal structure of the factory as well as the patriarchal image of “The Sirs”. Did you intentionally develop that aspect in the film?

The relationship we had with the workers, the executives and the owners, “The Sirs” of the factory as we called them, is not based on fantasy. It was a reality that we experienced, the relationship between employees and workers with the boss, very paternalistic. I recall it being neither good nor bad, just old-fashioned. A hierarchy similar to the models that existed in the large industrial family companies like Peugeot, Michelin, and many others. We lived in the Potain factories, which specialized in the construction of cranes.

With this short film, I actually wanted to evoke the interior life of the factory, with the offbeat perspective and reflections of a young teenager. Because beyond it being a place of work, the factory for us was our living environment. And during the evening, the empty factory became a different entity, a play space. Numerous dark corners, conducive to the strangest of fantasies, and this is where the ghosts in the factory arise. And if the ghosts of the workers haunted the factory… It is this unreal dimension that I wanted to evoke in the film, even if it was just briefly. A feature-length film that I write will elaborate on this issue, which is so dear to me. Because for me, the representation of a factory is accompanied by something somewhat fantastic, something that is rarely seen, because it is above all the social and economic aspect that we associate with a factory, which therefore results in a realistic representation. The factory is rarely seen as a mysterious character, full of secrets. The short film I’m currently working on with my team is called Wouhaaa!!!, still the story of a young sweeper (played by Yanis Bahloul) in a factory. We will tilt into a completely fantastic realm in both form and substance.

 Why did you choose not to explore more deeply the question of the personal hope your main character held in relation to the men of the factory?

At the end of the film, the main character explains that the workers’ stories are his favorite stories. It is a tribute to the memory of the factory workers. The director that I am did not forget where he came from. It is one of the issues of the film. Even if the result was a short and modest evocation of those workers I met. The ghosts of the factory of my childhood.

 In Ghosts in the Factory, there is a beautiful sequence on glass and its refractive power, almost as an extension of the power your main character had to make that same glass beautiful and shiny. How did you conceive that particular sequence in relation to the greater whole?

The teenager feels satisfaction after cleaning everything in the offices. And once all the lights are off, another light arises within him… Is it really the ashtray that is shining or is it he who imagines it? What matters is that he experiences and feels this light, which is a manifestation of his imagination… A kind of magic spark, an intuition, the birth of an idea… I found it interesting to show that even the less than glorious and repetitive chore that is the job of a sweeper could bring about a representation, an idea, artistic or otherwise. We created that sequence by playing with the effects of light, transparency and the superimposed image of the ashtray to communicate that feeling, both magical and naïve at the same time… A bit like Aladin who rubs the lamp and a genie appears. A reference to 1001 Nights. Still the idea of a tale. And beyond the recognition of his work, there is also a lesson of humility for the young sweeper: even if no one notices his work, he still indirectly experiences satisfaction from it.

 Finally, you produced Ghosts in the Factory in France. In your opinion, what does the French film industry have that the others don’t?

I think there is the opportunity to produce and direct very different films thanks to an economy and broadcasting windows which are unique in the world. We can see well-financed short films as well as encounter shorts made with very little money. It’s also due, I believe, to the system of intermittent theatrical employment in France with allows professionals to work on short films and interact with beginners who want to make their starts in the film industry. It is the encounters and the economic opportunities that facilitate them that seem so precious to me, and which facilitate the constant dynamism of the short film. So, despite a lack of means, I could count on the energy and enthusiasm of my team to see this film through to the end.

Programme for viewing Ghosts in the Factory: National Competition F10 and Schools Programme (SCO) session.