Critique: in the open air files Industry Interviews

Five years after Deltas, Back to the Shores, selected at numerous film festivals including Visions du Réel in Nyon, Dok.Fest in Munich and the Thessalonique Documentary Festival, Charlie Petersmann returns to the Soleur Days to present his new feature film, in the open, in the running for the prestigious price of soleure.

What does it mean to be a man, a "real", inside a microcosm like that of the working world?How to reconcile your private life with the rigor of a work that considers the body as a machine?With in the open air, Charlie Petersmann makes us penetrate the mazes of a big project in French -speaking Switzerland, a pharaonic project that develops before our eyes.Thanks to the incisive and aesthetically powerful look of Petersmann, the "shadow workers", mostly foreigners, take the front of the stage, a scene which they generally observe behind the scenes.

Despite their undeniable skills and heroic resistance to fatigue (in our heteronormative patriarchal society, a "real guy" has not supposed to experience pain or disarray), workers are often labeled as second class workers,bodies more than brains."All young people, in Switzerland, have the ambition to work in offices or at the bank; they do not like painful work - for that, we, immigrants", explains one of the site workers,as if to remind us that only those who are considered to be socially inferior must get your hands dirty.Thanks to the testimonies of people who have made this harsh work and demanding their daily life, we measure the importance of these "shadow men".

Many of them have chosen this profession out of pride and not only by necessity, a pride that transpires from virile masculinity brandished as a standard.Indeed, what strikes first in Petersmann's documentary is the omnipresence of male characters who, of all the stereotypes linked to their sex, are only one bite.Their falsely superficial conversations on their friends, on the fatigue of a work that updates their body to the test after day, or even on a difficult past that burns like fire (prison, war, need to sleep in his car dueprecariousness...) allows us to see the limits of this silent integration.

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— AUNTY FIRSTIE™️ Sat Jul 20 18:43:09 +0000 2019

What does that mean, being men?What are the obligations (and not only the undeniable privileges) which relate to a sex, the male sex, which has arrogantly appropriated a virility which he believes in his law?In the open air is a film that gives dignity and speech to humans convinced that they do not deserve the fires of the ramp, but also the soft-man portrait of men victims of stereotypes linked to their sex.In this regard, the documentary contains an interesting and strong scene where we see one of the characters taking care of his garden.The director stops, through daring close -ups, on the hands marked by the work of this shadow man, of the hands that can serve as work tools, but also to transform into an ephemeral house for a ladybug.Petersmann shows us the back-scène not only of a site, but also of men who, sometimes, leave a moment, in short and fleeting, to fall the virile mask that they believe to be forced to wear in a lasting way to be accepted, or simply to give meaning to their existence.

Open -air has been produced by Mnemosyn Films (Geneva) and RTS (Radio Television Switzerland).

(Translated from Italian)