This is the first compilation of films by Jean Painlevé, spanning his career from his beginnings as an actor to his work as a filmmaker in the leadup to WW1. In Methuselah, an avant-garde play by Ivan Goll, Painlevé is both actor and producer. This version includes a soundtrack added to the “film” – five sequences that were intended for projection during the play – in the eighties, when Painlevé discovered Maxime Jacob's original score for the play. The music was originally performed by The Republican Guard Band. Lacking the funds needed to engage this famous band, Painlevé chose to have a piano version recorded.

The social treatment of poverty is progressively replaced by repression. The poor, sometimes immigrant, being a victim to start with, becomes a potential criminal. The director observes the social violence and the stigmatisation which keep a whole social class in oblivion. He discovers, far remote from EU's democracy, the reality and the functioning of a social apartheid.

“This world is unfair. Its organization is inhuman. We know it. It shows. All the time. I don't want to denounce it. I'm seeking something else”. Through meetings in Limoges and in La Rochelle, images and sounds gleaned here or there, a search for what squatting is and what it can be, the alternatives, and through it all, utopia.