Tell us about how this project began.

My films have always dealt with the intimate, without highlighting human beings in their social environment. The next step was to observe the brutality of the mechanisms and exchanges ruling our world by juxtaposing one man’s humanity – a vulnerable man with no job security – with the violence of our society.

How do technical aspects – and the image, more precisely – fit into your setup?

First, I chose to take on a cinematographer who had only made documentaries. I wanted someone who was used to being completely autonomous with framing, focusing and aperture. I worked with Éric Dumont, a young director of photography, who was barely 30 years old and had never shot a fiction film. I would very precisely tell him about the point of view of the scene and he would be responsible for translating it into frames. At that point, he would become the acting agency of the sequence, since, based on what he was framing, he gave it one meaning, or another. What interested me was the point of view of Thierry the character/Vincent the actor. He is at the center of the story. It is what he perceives that interests me.

Would you call this a political film?

Yes. “Political” in the sense of “organization of the polis”, or city. This man is not fired because he did not do his job well. He is kicked out because some people want to make more money. Thierry is the mechanical consequence of a few invisible shareholders whose bank accounts needed a boost. He is the face of the unemployment statistics we hear about every day in the news. Thierry is a normal man – even though the idea of a normal man has taken a beating these past years – in a brutal situation: he has been unemployed for 20 months since his factory shut down, and is now forced to accept just about any job he can get. And when this job places the individual in a morally unacceptable situation, what can he do? Stay and be an accomplice of an unfair system, or leave and return to a precarious and unstable life? That is the heart of the film. A man’s place in a system.