Les Enfants du Borinage - Lettre à Henri Storck plot
Almost 70 years after Henri Storck's memorable documentary (Misère au Borinage), which portrayed the dramatic consequences of the economic crisis in the 1930s, the young Belgian filmmaker Patrick Jean set out in search of his own Borinage roots. He finds an area that is possibly even worse off. Since the closure of the mines in the 1970s, unemployment has soared and a large part of the population lives in poor conditions, with no prospect of improvement and without the fighting spirit of the past. He films the social misery there: disappeared mines, poverty, slums. Through an ex-miner, Emile, he gives silent poverty a voice. The families he comes in contact with entrust him with their misery, their resignation and sometimes their anger. The same thread runs through their testimonies: hunger, disease, the absence of social services, the quasi-systematic placement of children in centers for the disabled. Some families have been out of work for three generations. They live like in a social gutter. The hope of a better life does not exist because they have accepted that they are useless, inept and even harmful...