Cités de la plaine

Robert Kramer, who was largely active out of France in recent years, died in November 1999, while he was putting the finishing touches to his feature Cités de la plaine. Kramer left an oeuvre including masterpieces such as Milestones, Doc's Kingdom and Route One/USA.In Northern France, a blind man - Ben - looks back on his life. He is an immigrant who has managed to set up a business in the face of many setbacks and married a French woman who bore him a child, but as time passed, his life got harder: in Algeria, his mother's throat was cut, his marriage has broken down, and in the end he lost everything, even his sight...The film, shot entirely in Roubaix with non-professional actors, looks at reality in a restless and ever-innovative style. Kramer shot the film digitally because he considered that the video image would accentuate the indifferent harshness: the video makes the world both harder and more commonplace while it is seldom seductive in itself. He wanted to give the idea that these images were extracted from the world with great difficulty. The lower quality of the video image also serves to accentuate the experience of reality of the old man as he goes blind.