HEUREUX SÉJOUR

"If I hadn't had my camera, I wouldn't have dared look at them so closely. There was a kind of uneasiness, discomfort, fear... Then behind the eyepiece - less cowardly, as if protected - I wanted to see and hear the silences and the stories, outside time. See and hear my grandmother and her neighbours in the rest home prepare themselves to depart from life and head for death".
Marta Bergman

Heureux Séjour (Happy Stay) is the name of a home for the elderly where the grandmother of the Marta Bergman lives. The filmmaker is from Rumanian descent and, as grandmothers do, she recalls memories from old times.
In this film portrait, Marta Bergman visits the retirement home every sunday. She films her grandmother and other elderly women: among others, Léa, Berlinska, Lilly and Bella talk about their personal experiences and current concerns.
Sequences depicting their daily lives, their relations with the staff and the complicity that they have established are alternated with interviews – conducted by the director - of the elderly women.
Heureux Séjour is a touching and sensitive documentary which explores the direct cinema genre and faces us with ageing, death, physical and mental declines.

This work has been digitised in the frame of DCA Project