Stella

Stella is a 49-year-old Romanian woman living with her Gipsy husband in a shantytown located under motorway 86, in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, alongside the Eurostar railway tracks. In order to survive, she goes everyday to the same Paris metro station, sits herself on the stairs leading down to the tube and starts begging. The Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital is one of the rare places where she can have "normal" contacts with French people. There, she has new teeth made, thus regaining her dignity, despite everything.
Who is Stella? Why did she come to France? What did she leave behind in Romania? How did she adapt to living in a shantytown? How was her decision to become a beggar made? What is she waiting for, what are her projects... her dreams?
As I was asking myself all these questions, I decided to go and make a film about it. A film about all these invisible people, whom we pass by day after day, without really seeing them.
I immersed myself fully into Stella’s life. Determined not to fall into folklore, I took all the time I needed to translate her reality into images. I filmed Stella from close up, without concealing her normality, and without attempting to sensationalize, nor pretending to be making a scientific or sociological study. I offered her a space within which to express herself and she occupies it in an honest, subtle, sensitive manner. Stella thus allowed me to touch on the myth of the Eastern European immigrant to better deconstruct it.
"Stella", then, is all at once the story of a worker baffled by the chaotic history of her home country, of a lover endangering her own life in order to save that of her man, of an immigrant rejected but cured by the host country... and, above all, "Stella" is the story of an ordinary woman, a woman like us, who never stops dreaming.