The Writing on the Wall

Nous étions tous des noms d'arbres

A youth workshop in Derry is mounting various projects, including a dramatized enquiry into the death of a soldier. But when a squaddie is shot on the doorstep, then real life intrudes in the shape of the police and security forces. Gatti's brave and honorable film forcefully engages with a subject with which we on the “mainland” are often too ignorant – the images of violence are plainly visible day after day, but the means to interpret them is absent. 
Screening Schedule

No physical screenings scheduled.

Direction: Armand Gatti
Script: Armand Gatti
Cinematography: Armand Marco
Editing: Olivier van Malderghem
Sound: Bernard Ortion, Jean-Pierre Duret
Music: Philippe Hermon-Tamie
Actors: John Deehan, Brendan "Archie" Deeney, Paddy Doherty, Nigel Haggan, John Keegan, Neil McCaul
Choreography: Luc Dardenne
Format: 35mm
Color: B&W
Production Year: 1983
Duration: 109'
Contact: | Jean-Jacques Hocquard (La Parole errante)

Armand Gatti

One of the most acclaimed theater writer/directors of the 20th century, Gatti was originally a member of the informal Left Bank group of filmmakers that included Alain Resnais, Chris Marker and Agnès Varda, but remains an elusive figure for many cinephiles. He was born in 1924 in a shantytown in Monaco to Auguste Rainier an Italian anarchist from Piedmont, who escaped murder in a Chicago slaughterhouse because of his political activities and fled Benito Mussolini’s regime and to Letizia Lusona a maid. During World War II, Gatti joined a small French resistance maquis. Captured, tortured, and sentenced to a concentration camp in Hamburg where he was forced to work in a diving bell at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, he eventually escaped and joined a British Special Air Service special forces team. After the war, he worked as an award-winning journalist for many years until he traveled with Marker, published his first plays, and directed his first film, Enclosure (L'Enclos, 1961). He was awarded the French Legion of Honour in 1999, the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2004 and the Grand prix du théâtre from the Académie française in 2013. He died on April 6, 2017.

Filmography

1961 L’ enclos | The Enclosure
1963 El otro Cristóbal | The Other Christopher
1969 Der Übergang über den Ebro | The Ebro Crossing
1983 Nous étions tous des noms d'arbres | The Writing on the Wall