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Director's Statement
GAGARINE tells the story of Yuri: a character caught between two stages of life, a dreamer dealing with the disappearance of his low-rent building, as if it were a rite of passage he is not quite ready for. The idea for this feature first came to us when we discovered the Gagarine building in Ivry-sur-Seine in October 2014. Launched by Yuri Gagarin himself in 1963, this place used to embody the utopia of a collective living. The story of this building, its symbolic as well as architectural form, immediately stroke us. The stories of the inhabitants we met there, confirmed how unique the building was. Once a utopia, it was now a ghetto deemed to be torn down. This project first took the form of a short film, GAGARINE, in 2015. The film traveled through international festivals and received the Sundance Channel Award. But we wanted to go further in exploring the inhabitants' lives. We look at Yuri's building through his imagination. For Yuri, his beloved housing project is a vast spaceship he repairs. This fantastic vision is a way for us to approach the question of how inner cities are represented, Magical realism is a way to empower and change one’s perspective. By transforming the building into a "luminous ship", he pays tribute to it, while also showing he is capable of freeing himself from it. It is also a way for us to fight clichés about inhabitants in social housing buildings, often categorised as territories where people have neither the resources nor the capacity to dream nor decide on their own future. Our main character has many weaknesses and fears, but he has the strength of his vision, a vision he built within his building, thanks to the community around him, thanks to the richness of this specific context, and that is the reason why it is so difficult for him to accept the end of it. We want to show how rich this diversity is.