Directors noteWhen Yann Legal conceived the project « Childhoods », he suggested we should direct an episode related to the childhood of Jacques Tati. At the outset, a historical film, made in France, was not a natural part of our filmography. We had always worked in the arab world on very personal scripts, inspired by our daily surroundings and often filmed in our own house. Being part of this project meant we had to face Tati, a history of cinema, discover whether we could work outside our natural context and extent our territory to another geography. A child, taller than the others, not knowing what to do with his cumbersome body ; a disproportionate body, so abnormal that it turns an assumed handicap into an asset, into a type of resistance to the uniformity which tends to supersede our present world ; a body that seems off-beat in a modern world always seeking more speed, more achievements… No one ever explored, as Tati did, the disfunction of bodies, the very moment when the well-oiled machine suddenly jams because of a troublemaker, of a foreign body. Tati centered his cinema on that very body, a cinema often defined as a re-appropriation of the body. It is this re-appropriation we seek. The emergence of the individual is central to our cinema. When and how does one detach himself from the group and dare to assert one’s difference ? It is that transformation which interests us, the very instant when things evolve, the passage where Tati himself evolves from « he who is laughed at » to « he with whom we laugh ».
