GARE DU NORD

Paris, Gare du Nord, anything can happen there, as well as trains arriving. We’d like to stay there, but we need to hurry…Just as thousands of lives cross there, Ismaël, Mathilde, Sacha and Joan will meet there. Every day, Ismaël is dazzled, fascinated, exhausted by this place. It is on the RER platform that he sees Mathilde for the first time. Gradually, they fall in love. They meet Sacha and Joan. Sacha is looking for his missing daughter, Joan spends her life in this station between Lille, London and Paris. The station is like a bubble that everyone passes through, French people, immigrants, emigrants, travelers, ghosts…It is a crossroads where each life passes quickly and then disappears.

CLAIRE SIMON was born in Great Britain, but it was in France where she developed a career full of international awards. Her adventurous spirit led her to study ethnology and to first come into contact with film in the Argel film library, where she did a course on editing and joined the editing team of Dora Et La Lanterne Magique (Pascal Kan.,1977). But Simon wanted to further her knowledge and learning, and she enrolled in the Ateliers Varan, founded by Jean Rouch as spaces to train in hands-on documentary making. There she discovered Direct Cinema and directed her first short film, Tandis Que J’agonise (1982)