The screening of this documentary will be followed by a discussion with the two researchers.
About the documentary
It is little known, but thousands of foreigners who came to settle temporarily or permanently in our country were often forced to live in more or less precarious shanty towns, which from the mid-1950s onwards were referred to as "slums."
This research has identified no fewer than 71 such places in the greater Lyon area alone between the 1920s and the 1970s. An important page in the history of immigration in the Rhône-Alpes region, which is also part of the region's working-class history, was written there: in Villeurbanne, Gerland, Saint-Étienne, and elsewhere in these neighborhoods renamed "villages nègres" (black villages), "médinas," "la Mouise," "la Zone," and so on. These places were home to North Africans, Italians, Spaniards, and also French people, including many nomads who had settled down.
How did their inhabitants live? Why were they there? How were they viewed by the outside world? How did they leave? Their story is told in this documentary film, which gives prominence to first-hand accounts and retraces the unique existence of our slums and unsanitary shanty towns.
Learn more
Contact: Olivier Chavanon, Methodological Director of the LLSETI Survey Division