The machine is your lord and master

In 2014, a young Chinese worker throws himself out of his dormitory in the anonymity of a sprawling factory town. He leaves behind a handful of vibrant poems about his suffering, his working conditions and the workshop. Céline Chatelain has seized on this labour drama to conduct a committed investigation into the relationship between man and machine; a composite investigation, with drawers, full of breath, in which she cries out, testifies, chants and dances, accompanied in the meanderings of her research by a musician as laconic as he is perceptive, using guitar and computer-assisted music. In the symbolic setting of the machine room at the Lycée Fillod in Saint-Amour, which specialises in the metal arts, she takes a winding path of investigation, all the way back to Christmas Eve 1865, when America inaugurated the Chicago slaughterhouses with great fanfare, inspiring Henry Ford to develop his optimised model of assembly line work.