SECTIONS // PANORAMA OF THE SPANISH DOCUMENTARY

Brumaire

Out of Competition
Joseph Gordillo
66' / 2015 / France, Spain
Web: http://www.veoprod.com/flv_portfolio/brumaire/
French
English and spanish subtitled

Brumaire, in the French revolutionary calendar, is the month of mist and fog.
From Emile Zola’s Germinal to Brumaire, a cycle of industrial and social history is completed.
The very last French coal mine shut down ten years ago. And over the past ten years everything has changed.
A former miner is taking us into his deepest memories, through darkness of mine galleries, smell, work, sweat, comrades, social struggles, and the final closure.
Emptiness.
The younger generation was born out of those ruins, in another world, on a forgotten land, in Lorraine region. Nowadays, workers are denied collective strength, threatened by unemployment, trapped in precarious jobs, and open to far-right political ideas.
With no dreams.
How could a working class land, where the blood of major union struggles used to flow, end up brought down by a faceless enemy?

Director's Biography

Spanish and French, born on March 1965 the 1st in Metz, Lorraine, Joseph Gordillo is a journalist since 1989. He begins his professional career as a camera-reporter RTL Television in Luxembourg. He focuses in doing international reporting for that channel and covers the major events of the time like Rwanda in 1994.
Gradually, he focuses in documentary in the form of photographs and collections of testimonies. He publishes his first book about the last iron miners, published by Editions Klopp in 1992. Then a second published by Editions Serpenoise on colliers, « Passion Charbon ». In 2002, this book is awarded with the Prize of the National Academy of Metz and the Price of the General Councils of Lorraine.
Since 1998, Joseph Gordillo is working with Arte as Grand Reporter on many news magazines, including covering the war in Iraq, the situation in Darfur or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza.
In 2007, he wrote and directed his first film d’auteur, « Le Mur des Oubliés ». The documentary will be screened in a lot of art houses in France and Switzerland. This first film won the Grand Prix at the festival Traces of life in Clermont-Ferrand and selected at the Figra (Le Touquet) and Cinespaña (Toulouse).
In 2010, Joseph Gordillo makes a short documentary film, « Siriman ». This film will be awarded at Documenta Madrid festival, and Cinestrat - Alicante (Spain - Peru - Argentina) and selected in the festivals of Toulouse, Cadiz, Huesca, Kassel (Germany) and Barcelona.
In 2012, he wins in Berlin the Franco-German journalism prize in the multimedia category for the web series, « Les Indignés » (Arte).
In 2015, he finishes shooting Brumaire, a 66 minutes long documentary he co-wrote with Laetitia Giroux. Commissioned by France 3 Grand-Est, the film was selected to enter the competition at DOK Leipzig.
Since 2007, Joseph Gordillo, based in Madrid, is correspondant in Spain and Portugal for the the Franco-German television channel Arte.