After an accident caused actor Fatsah Bouyahmed to lose his memory, previously unseen archival footage from Aubervilliers—the housing complex on the outskirts of Paris where he grew up—begins to reconnect him both to his personal past and to the collective memory of his community. Filmed in the 1980s during an ambitious urban renewal project, the images depict a neighborhood committed to improving its living conditions and envisioning a better future. As Fatsah revisits that footage forty years later, memories of family, friendship, music, and daily life resurface, along with the social tensions of the era: the rise of racism, inequality, and exclusion. Moving between past and present, Auber89 revisits a fleeting moment of hope before disillusionment reshaped the Parisian suburbs, while the textures of television and VHS tapes ground the story in the sensory world of the 1980s.
Country
France, ItalyYear
2026Length
80'
Category
DocumentaryScreenplay
Giuseppe Schillaci, Gabrielle CulandCinematography
Zoltan HauvilleEditing
Christine BouteillerMusic
Thibault FrisoniSound
Maya RosaProduction
Label VidéoCoproduction
Paolo Maria Spina Revolver Sylvain Poubelle, Bruno Niepceron vià 93 Pierre-Jean Bartheye Entre PrisesDistribution
Revolver (Paolo Maria Spina) and Valtellina DistribuzioneSynopsis
Biography
Giuseppe Schillaci is a filmmaker and writer, born in Palermo and based in Paris; his work has won awards at major international film festivals. His previous documentary, Bosco Grande (2024), premiered at the Venice Film Festival’s Giornate degli Autori and won the Grand Prize in the National Competition at FIPADOC in Biarritz. In addition to his work as a filmmaker, he has published two novels and contributes to leading Italian and French literary magazines.
Statement
Auber 89, like many of my films, was born out of an encounter—an encounter that led to many others. The first person to guide me into this world was Patrice Lutier, the architect of the participatory redevelopment of the Aubervilliers housing complexes in the 1980s. Patrice opened the doors to the Aubervilliers municipal archives for me: nearly one hundred hours of footage on Hi8 and U-Matic, stored there for over forty years.
As I watched these recordings, I felt a strange sensation, as if those images were part of my own childhood memories, set in a working-class neighborhood of Palermo. Perhaps all suburbs are alike. These video archives are imbued with an extraordinary collective vitality, a shared determination to overcome difficulties together. Yet I didn’t know how to tell the story of the French banlieues unfolding before my eyes. I was looking for someone who could embody these images from within—a unique voice capable of conveying both this story and the struggle of an entire community against unemployment, racism, heroin addiction, generational conflict, and political disillusionment.
— Giuseppe Schillaci
Archival materials
Aubervilliers Municipal Archives, the director’s personal archives (Palermo).
