La Boîte à tartines

Show me your lunch box and I shall tell you where you come from! It is this ordinary, functional object that is at the core of a surprising and entertaining investigation of Belgium and its people. With humour and naive amazement, serious research and intuition, Floriane Devigne, in her first film, embarks on a journey to try and understand her country, brandishing the lunch box as a link to hold together this diverse community. With a light touch she reveals a plethora of insights in the humble receptacle: Marxist theories, Joris Ivens’ Borinage film on Belgian miners, French-Wallonese-Flemish differences, slag heaps and parks, malnutrition and child poverty, immigration, linguistic and cultural boundaries, the work of a baker, plastic factories and waste separation, advertisement, childhood memories, sociology and everyday wisdom, state libraries and street polls. She cuddles and destroys the box, builds statistic towers with it, drives it around and looks deep into its etymology. And casually she also pokes fun at her own obsession with the object. A film inside a lunch box. (DOK.fest München)