Survivance

Released in cinema on October 18th 2017

Bricks shows how the life of a simple commodity can be the mirror of a global crisis. During the housing bubble, real estate developers and construction businessmen were the « brick kings ». Bricks had turned into gold. But in 2007, the housing bubble exploded. Here lies the mad story of the bricks: in the same country, 400 000 subprime mortgagers risk foreclosure while five million new apartments remain empty. Bricks is about the life of those who make bricks, who live in cities made of bricks, who fight to call these bricks home.

 Official trailer by SURVIVANCE on VIMEO.

FESTIVALS SELECTION

2017 : Documenta Madrid - Spain - Competition
2017 : Etats généraux du film documentaire - Lussas (France)
2017 : Festival Jean Rouch - Paris - Best First Film
2017 : Cinélatino - Toulouse (France)

biography

Quentin Ravelli is a young sociologist. Former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, he conducted his doctoral research on the pharmaceutical industry and is currently working at the French national center for scientific research (CNRS). He is also a successful novelist, under the name of Clément Cagliari: both his first and second novels, Retrait de marché (2011) and Gibier (2013) have been published by Gallimard in the prestigious NRF collection. With his first film Bricks, he’s mixing sociology, political economy and ethnography to tell the story of the spanish crisis.

director's note

In Spain, when bringing up the financial crisis, the media talks more often about the « ladrillo », the « bricks », than Wall Street or City traders. The brick has been personified, endowed with human vices and virtues: you can be a « King of ladrillo », a « victim of ladrillo» or a « ladrillo profiteer ». The spanish language’s inventiveness goes so far as to suggest a new verb: someone or something can end up being « enladrillado ». After having written two novels about commodities that are emblematic of a particular economy -beetroots in communist Hungary and a miraculous antibiotic during the post-war boom in France- my curiosity was aroused by this personification of bricks. I started to travel across Andalusia and Castilla, taking on a sociological approach. There, I was struck by the sight of gigantic piles of bricks discarded by the roadsides, stretching endlessly in front of dozens of factories. They were echoing in a fascinating way the « for sale » signs hanged all over Spain on windows with closed shutters. Most spanish housing is made of clay bricks, and entire cities and dozens of villages lived off their production. Today, for miles around you can see disused industrial land sand red clay pits. These impressive pictures and the incisive words of the Spanish people I met along the brickroad have inspired me to make a film: the brick would serve as a guide to understand contemporary capitalism, to feel its upheavals as well as the often amazing individual and collective strategies it engenders everyday. In a world accustomed to statistics and unemployment rates curves, I believe that we need to rely on very concrete things to put the human being back at the centre of our concerns. Therefore, starting from a simple commodity, this film will be set in the context of the current crisis, as lived and told by the inhabitants of Spain.

crew

Joaquín Ormázabal, Milton, Luis Chamarro, Blanca Janeth Malte, Katerine Malte, Gladys, Pedro Rognoni, José Luis, Julio Touza, Marcos, Miguel, Javier Guzmán, Miguel Cocero, Alejandra, Cristina

Photography :  Cécile Bodénès, Almudena Sánchez
Sound : Álvaro Silva Wuth
Editing : Catherine Mabilat
Sound Editing: Pierre Bariaud
Mix : Matthieu Deniau
Colours : Graziella Zanoni
Music composers: Thierry Mazurel and Yann Pittard

Support

With the participation of Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée

And the Support of

Région Ile de France in collaboration with le Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée

CNRS Images

PROCIREP- société des producteurs

ANGOA

Fonds d’Aide à l’Innovation Audiovisuelle of the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée

Dowloads

Dossier de presse

DISTRIBUTION contact

DCP : Survivance - guillaume@survivance.net / 09 80 61 59 06