Sur les cendres du vieux monde
Laurent Hasse
2001 - 73 min - Vidéo - Couleur - France, Belgique, Luxembourg

The Fensch Valley in Lorraine, cradle and flagship of the French iron and steel industry – is what you can read in encyclopaedias, but at the dawn of the third millennium the findings are bitter indeed. Ninety-five percent of the factories, the region's economic heart that had forged the landscape, have been destroyed and the population is his full force by the crisis.
The children of the iron and steel industry do not seen to have any other alternative except precarious jobs or exodus to nearby Luxembourg, the new El Dorado, tax heaven at the heart of Europe. Such is the valley today: abandoned, distraught, and sacrificed on the altar of globalisation.
Why and how did we get here? How does one live in Hayange and in the valley today? And since the 21st century will be that of ultra liberalism, what will become of this society set up on the cult of the single industry, established on the paternalism of the ironmasters and henceforth the orphan of the iron era?
All these questions have inhabited me since my return from filming my childhood region.