Festivals/Awards:
Prix Cinéart – Festival “Filmer à tout prix” Bruxelles 2015, Festival International du Film Francophone de Namur 2015, Krakow Film Festival 2015
Director's Bio-Filmography:
CHARLOTTE GRÉGOIRE (n. 1975, Belgia) este o regizoare de film documentar care locuiește în Bruxelles. A studiat antropologie, antropologie vizuală și dans. Filmografia sa include MÉANDRES (2010), scurtmetrajele KITCHEN IN NEW-YORK (2009) și ANDRÉ ET NANDI (2001), cât și instalația video NOVEMBRE DANS MON QUARTIER – INSTANTS DOCUMENTAIRES (2008).
ANNE SCHILTZ (n. 1975, Luxemburg) a studiat științe cognitive și este doctor în antropologie. În 2013 a regizat documentarele de lungmetraj CELLO TALES și ORANGERIE (co-regizat cu Benoît Majerus).
EMPLOYMENT OFFICE este al treilea documentar co-regizat de GRÉGOIRE și SCHILTZ după COMMON GROUND (2012) și WE ARE STAYING / STĂM (2007).
Director's / Curator's Statement:
The film shows people coming up against bureaucracy, by nature rigid and constrictive, and so asks what it means nowadays to be employed. In our film Employment Office we focus on the moment when the system (the institution) encounters the individual (the unemployed). Across a desk advisors and the advised face each other. On one side sits the office employee whose job it is to evaluate the efforts made by unemployed people in looking for a job, assessing their ongoing right to receive benefits. On the other side sits the claimant, who has come to defend their situation with dignity and to prove their determination in finding a job. You can feel the tension not only in the lobby, where the unemployed people are waiting for their name to be called, but also in the partitioned offices, where the interviews are held. Throughout the film emotions vary from laughter to tears. Determination, misunderstanding, relief, anger or fear fill these encounters, when the agents make final judgments on the continuing inclusion of the claimant in the system, or their exclusion. We preferred subtlety to forcefulness. We show in the film the gulf between rigid administration and individual situations which often reveal the inadequacy of procedures, their limits and their absurdity. By focusing on the faces of the protagonists, the film shows us the intensity of the encounters. Even though they meet on an unequal footing, they have their own way of understanding the procedures, and in how they apply them and live through them. Without judging either party, the film questions existing prejudices with humanity. We show the complexity of the situations unemployed people endure, the way they are made to feel guilty, the energy they spend looking for a job, and the strategies they develop to keep their benefits. We show the inequality of the assessments. But we also question the day-to-day role of the ONEM staff. What comes through most clearly is the absurdity of the system. The economic reality outside the office is ever-present, and shows violence meted out by our society on those excluded from the system. Every interview poses essential questions: the insecurity of the job market, the inequality of opportunity, the end of manual labour, the impotence of the unions, the suffering or the pleasure of work. On a bitter note, we question the way work is shared today in a world where inequality is growing steadily and where social cohesion is under threat. (Anne Schiltz, Charlotte Grégoire)