24/03/2025 - Marie Tavernier delivers a passionate, sensitive and fragmented portrait of an autodidact who’s spent 43 years of his life in nuclear subcontracting

"Back when I used to sort through highly radioactive waste in an unsafe way, I’d get a tingling feeling in my fingertips at the end of the day." Bent over his computer in his modest little house, trade unionist Yvon - the sole protagonist of this incredibly engaging documentary of the same name, directed by Marie Tavernier and unveiled in competition at the 47th Cinéma du Réel Festival - tries to put his life story into words ("no-one can rob me of what I’m writing now"). Memories float to the surface, thoughts are made explicit, and dreams also make an occasional appearance in this story about a man whose manual career has been spent in a particularly dangerous and angst-inducing industry, and who is slowly pieced together in this poignant, elliptical and highly personal portrait.

"Our bosses managed our work based on doses (…) They’d talk about the doses people had been exposed to, they’d compare them". Diving back into the oppressive arena of reactor buildings, cumbersome protective suits and stifling ventilated helmets, Yvon unpicks his trajectory (spent in power plants ranging from Tricastin to Fessenheim via Saint-Laurent-des-Eaux) in the world of nuclear clean-up subcontracting, governed by the Damocles sword ("we’re not going to get fried") of REMs (units measuring doses of ionising radiation which produce the same biological effect as an absorbed dose of regular X rays). Lifting the veil on the safety flaws in past working conditions (resulting in terrifying long-term health risks), on a solitary and anxious life composed of long-term work placements far from his family, on the social-outcast profiles of the workers recruited by this industry, and on his initiation into trade union circles as an autodidact, our neo-writer has a lot to say, and he likes to talk too. And his introspection down the lens of the camera slowly takes us back to his painful childhood…

"In the village square, the coper sold the most tired horses, cheating his customers." This memory from Yvon’s youth - which also mirrors his involvement in subcontracting the most thankless jobs in the nuclear industry ("exhibiting employees on the market square, prodding and judging them, potentially choosing them and then sending others to the slaughterhouse"), as previously explored by Rebecca Zlotowski in her fiction film Grand Central [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Rebecca Zlotowski
film profile] (2013) - provides Marie Tavernier with an incredibly pertinent narrative approach. Lending an intelligent, metaphorical class-struggle dimension to a documentary which combines great simplicity (the self-portrait of an unpretentious and endearing man) with skilful editing (archive footage showing the construction of power plants, short sequences offering a breathing space in the protagonist’s daily life, and a temporal interlacement of memories with personal and professional aspects of his existence), the filmmaker manages to inform us on the subject of nuclear power in an edifying, artisanal and creative way. But above all, she pays wonderful tribute to a very human soul in search of freedom in a world which tries to ensure cases of contamination and decontamination remain invisible.

Yvon was produced by La Société des Apaches in co-production with Lyon Métropole TV.

(Translated from French)