It was a message posted on social networks in the middle of the Cannes Film Festival that raised the alarm.
At the age of 94, the New Wave filmmaker Jacques Rozier was evicted from his home in Paris.
To avoid the intervention of the police, he must have left with his wife in fragile health, Thursday, July 15 and has nowhere to go, except for a studio of fifteen square meters where he already stores his archives including boxes full of film reels.
To read also: Death of Raymond Cauchetier, the eye of the New Wave
This fall, the filmmaker, Jean Vigo Prize for Maine Océan (1986), and René Clair Prize (1997) and Carrosse d'or (in 2002) for his entire career marked by films like
Du cote d'Orouët
with Bernard Menez,
The Shipwrecked People of Turtle Island
with Pierre Richard will be celebrated with a retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française.
This same Pierre Richard who praised the merits and the singularity of Rozier seeking to eliminate the tics of the actors, to give birth to the unforeseen, if not the unforeseeable.
This recognition of a man who no longer has a place to stay is a cruel paradox.
And who no longer has the financial means to ensure the post-production necessary for screenings at the Cinémathèque.
In a long text published on Facebook, his collaborator Michèle Berson explains that the owner of the apartment wants to recover her property to install her student son there. What will become of the nonagenarian filmmaker? Where are his friends? What is the National Cinema Center doing for one of the last representatives of the New Wave?
“This story has been going on for four years. Two high-cost lawsuits were lost and did not allow the lease to be renewed,
regrets Michèle Berson, who specifies that she
raised
the alert without having consulted the filmmaker.
Le Figaro
tried to reach her without success. According to Michèle Berson, requests for relocation to the mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo for five years as to the Ministry of Culture have not yielded anything.
“Only the elected representative of the city of Martigues Florian Salazar-Martin near Marseille and Gaby Charroux, mayor of Martigues tried, two years ago, to challenge the prefect and the HLM office in Paris. Not even a response, even negative from the latter. The situation is frankly hopeless
», Deplores Michèle Berson who continues to fight to offer an end of career worthy of the talent of Jacques Rozier.
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