Life is a Very Strange Thing - TRAILER

https://store.der.org/life-is-a-very-strange-thing-p1026.aspx

Les McLaren, Annie Stiven
color, 78 min, 2018
in English, French
English subtitles

Life Is A Very Strange Thing is an intriguing mosaic of post-colonial France revealed through four generations of a remarkable French family.

The Australian filmmakers last saw Frédéric Duvelle in the 1970s when he was a rebellious teenager recording traditional music in remote villages of Papua New Guinea. Thirty-five years later, a chance reunion became an opportunity to fill in missing decades and to discover his remarkable family history, from his Governor grandfather in colonial Indochina to the populist politics and terror attacks of contemporary France.

We meet Frédéric's parents: mother Elisabeth, a politically engaged textile artist who raised Fred and his two sisters in a working-class suburb of Paris; and composer father Charles who grew up in Laos and Cambodia, and became celebrated for his pioneering recordings of traditional music in Africa.

Frédéric's recounts his own unlikely journey from school dropout, to ethnomusicologist then executive of a multinational garbage enterprise.
He is a wily raconteur and avid collector of brocante. Shadowed by his endearing ancient dog Punch, encounters with friends in Paris and Bordeaux unfold rich layers of French culture and identity: an enigmatic African artist discusses Cubism; a cameo family lunch with a menu of oysters, history and politics; a 93-year-old WW2 Resistance veteran who forgives; and an irascible brocanteur who can't forget.

The youngest generation confront issues at the heart of cosmopolitan France: Frédéric's niece is an activist with FEMEN who protest against conservative values as the populist right-wing National Front is on the rise, and his daughter has a near encounter on the night of the Bataclan terror attack.

Life Is A Very Strange Thing is part road movie, part meditation. It's unique mix of observation, archive footage from Papua New Guinea and Indochina, indigenous music and rich sound design evokes a lyrical and compelling portrait of family, place, politics and memory.

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