Quand la ville se lève

As farmers prepare to set fire to a model of a city that will destroy their land, the project’s architect sees a haunting memory resurface: the struggle her mother waged to avoid being evicted from her apartment.

In this documentary fiction, Charlotte Lagrange explores the relentless machinery of evictions and resistance, from rural exodus to gentrification. Through a transgenerational female polyphony, stories intersect beneath the unsettling light of a red moon, bringing to the surface past and present struggles to inhabit the world.

Associated with the Scène de recherche, director and author Charlotte Lagrange met residents of the Saclay plateau, young and old, some living there for a long time and others newly arrived. From these stories emerged a theatrical fresco in which soil artificialization, rampant urbanization and invisible resistance intertwine.

The performance follows a committed landscape designer who revisits the memory of her own family’s eviction. At the same time, a couple is confronted with a strange plant emerging from their parquet floor. Interwoven stories that question dispossession and those who oppose it. The press has written about it.

Text and direction Charlotte Lagrange With Mathias Bentahar, Cécile Coustillac, Chloé Ploton, Olive Malleville and Jean-Baptiste Verquin