Brumaire

Brumaire, in the French revolutionary calendar, is the month of mist and fog. From Emile Zola’s Germinal to Brumaire, a cycle of industrial and social history is completed. The very last French coal mine shut down ten years ago. And over the past ten years everything has changed. A former miner is taking us into his deepest memories, through darkness of mine galleries, smell, work, sweat, comrades, social struggles, and the final closure. Emptiness. The younger generation was born out of those ruins, in another world, on a forgotten land, in Lorraine region. Nowadays, workers are denied collective strength, threatened by unemployment, trapped in precarious jobs, and open to far-right political ideas. With no dreams. How could a working class land, where the blood of major union struggles used to flow, end up brought down by a faceless enemy ?