The Yellow Vests Documentary is the unadulterated fury of the Yellow Vests.

The meaning of “the world” – you have to see

If the “yellow vests” spawned a series of documentaries released at the time of the movement’s emergence (I want the sun!by François Ruffin, 2019) or taken at the peak of the mobilization (Ხalkhby Emmanuel Grass, 2021), Yellow tracksby Sylvestre Meinzer, picks up the next party, five years after the first demonstrations, which spread throughout France.

On footage shot across the country (landscapes, former gathering places, and former Yellow Vest workplaces), a trained ethnographer interpolates the testimonies of people reflecting on what led them to join the movement that began in October 2018.

The clever idea of ​​the film is to separate the image and the sound and to avoid the automatism of showing in front of the camera, which often adds nothing and weighs down many documentaries. Yellow tracks It also avoids the trap of making a political and politicized documentary without reflecting on the form under the pretext that only the content prevails. The juxtaposition of these stories of political outrage and these peaceful images especially helps to create the impression of a forced return to calm—the anger remains untouched, as if waiting to one day resurface. But the film gradually reveals its weakness: for more than an hour and forty hours, the formal system cannot avoid a certain monotony.