Documentary Uncovers Forgotten History of 80,000 Moroccan Miners in France

The story of the mine workers began in the 1960s and 1970s. In search of labor, France recruited 80,000 Moroccans. Young and illiterate men who agreed to work at lower cost in the mines of the North and Lorraine. This is the story of these miners that director Frédéric Laffont tells in "The Life Ahead of Us".

In an interview with RFI, the director said he was unaware of this history until the day he came across an article published in the newspaper Le Monde. It told the story of Félix Mora, a man who in the 1960s and 1970s recruited almost 80,000 Moroccans in southern Morocco, Berbers from the countryside. Nicknamed "the Slave Trader of the Coal Mines", this former military man had recruited miners in the villages of southern Morocco, with the blessing and support of the Moroccan and French authorities.

These men knew they were heading into the unknown and that they might never return home, but the quest for a better life pushed them to accept the most humiliating treatments. It is in the name of all these sufferings that Frédéric Laffont had the idea of such a documentary to talk about the life of these Moroccans who made the history of France. "The thing that struck me the most is that I didn’t film more men than those in the film. These are men who were often exposed to silicone. They were very afraid to speak at a time when everyone was masked because of Covid. And they all tell me: I have nothing to say," reports RFI.

He emphasizes that "this is not a television casting with characters having an extremely easy elocution saying conventional remarks on immigration. They have a singular speech". The film was shot with seven people: workers, a mother, and two children. "This makes a choral song that is much greater than them. I find it magnificent, because never heard before. These people simply respond, very modestly in their own way by saying ’I’ in the most beautiful way. They make declarations of love to our country like we have never heard before," says the director.

The title of the documentary is a phrase that the Moroccans repeated when, wanting to board the boat, the fear of the unknown was stronger. "We thought the life ahead of us," they repeated to ward off their anxieties. For Frédéric Laffont, "the Moroccans had a status below the others. Very quickly, when you go down into the mine for the first time several hundred meters underground, the dream turns into a nightmare. But precisely, the voice of these men is in the greatest dignity of not having a conventional speech on all that we imagine about the harshness of life. They have transformed this ordeal into a realized dream, because the children are there and they have been well raised. This makes lives of extreme dignity," he emphasized.

He specifies that the life of these men remains a real sacrifice consented to in silence and the greatest discretion. For him, this film is "undisputedly a success story".