Le Temps des cerises
Claude Val
2009 - 52 min - DV Cam - Couleur et Noir & Blanc - France

"Le Temps des cerises" (A Time of Cherries) was the most popular song during the Paris Commune; a song full of hope that was exchanged for a coat one cold wintry day. Hardly anyone, however, remembers the man who wrote it: Jean-Baptiste Clément. There are streets all over France named after the composer and his name still sings from the top of Montmartre, yet the place where he is remembered most fondly is in the Ardennes, where he helped the metalworkers fight for their rights.
From Paris to Charleville-Mézières via the north of France and Belgium, the film’s author takes us with him on the trail of his ancestor. He lived during the infancy of photography and Impressionism, at the same time as Rimbaud and Baudelaire, the birth of the 3rd Republic, the formation of the first trades unions and the struggles that foreshadowed what we are now living through with globalisation.