La vie farpaite | De la vie des enfants au XXIème siècle

Editorial

The LFKs-Jean Michel Bruyère collective has occupied a studio, Les Cathédrales, at La Friche Belle de Mai since 2006. « The place is hybrid, quickly familiar, hard to describe », wrote Rachid Laïreche in an article published in Libération in August 2025. The article was about Sup de Sub, a neighborhood higher education school and an initiative run by LFKs from 2019 to 2025, with the studio as a central location. (Videodrome 2 partnered with Sup de Sub, hosting numerous screenings for its students.) In the LKFs studio, a place for work and creation, Sup de Sub students created and shared their work, attended classes and recorded Twitch shows, all among the works of the LFKs collective, installed and moved around… Everyone who had the chance to spend time in the studio shared Rachid Laïreche’s impression: it was a place where you felt good, alert, amused and moved, surprised and astonished, alive. It is indeed hard to describe: that is the nature of beauty—it is indescribable. What made this enormous storage space in a former factory beautiful? Was it because we found this beauty bitter, or because we wanted to insult it? In any case, we must speak of it in the past tense. The LFKs collective is leaving La Friche (and we will tactfully say that this is not entirely the collective’s doing). An exhibition of the collective’s works runs at La Friche from October 24 to December 13, 2026. At Videodrome 2, we are showing three films by the collective, created as part of three of these initiatives.

La vie farpaite

De la vie des enfants au XXIème siècle

by Papisthione | 2000 | France, Senegal | 57 min

The lives of children living on the streets of Dakar. Two groups of wanderers are followed day and night through the city by a camera that calmly records the reactions, gazes and silent thoughts of children who are drugged, raped and destroyed. These children’s destinies ended on the very day they began, and we see them reduced to the worst conditions of existence. Through its form (black-and-white images at an often disrupted speed, sometimes silent, sometimes with sound), the film maintains and asserts its distance from documentary style, while remaining grounded in moments of real life that were never staged. De la vie des enfants du XXIe siècle is the first work by Papisthione (17), a student filmmaker trained by Jean-Michel Bruyère through the work of Man-Keneen-Ki, a Senegalese association of artists supporting children living on the streets. The film was shot in Dakar from July 1999 to January 2000.

Practical information

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