Genève

In September 1995, I leave Paris to set up home in Ivry-sur-Seine. In the course of my comings and goings through the town streets, I glimpse, through a gap between buildings, a depth which hints at a vast empty space beyond.
One day, I go through one of the openings and I discover a strange place. An immense vacant expanse, wide open to view and to passage, a motley landscape where grass and concrete, trees and scrub alternate, and lording the centre of this vast bare space, is a long, high mound covered in greenery.
This film traces, in the form of a diary or travel notebook, the discovery and exploration of this remarkable space. It sees this wasteland as a kind of monumental, many-layered, archaeological site where you can make out the former faces of the town and picture the different ways in which people have made this purposeless land their own.
For many than twenty years, this abandoned site has been the inspiration for many a project of the imagination, realised or dreamt, individual or collective. Through the stories of these many "dreamers", and access to numerous private archives, this film also wisges to pay homage to the creativity that the place has inspired