● A brand new experience

During our LIMBO stays in Conques, we created a space that enabled these young survivors, not necessarily to speak, but to be able to do so. Over the course of the week, the art therapy sessions - through theatre, dance, photography, music - work on the body's memory, restoration, and the link to others. And little by little, speech resurfaces. But when young people cannot speak, they often sing. They improvise little texts, which speak of exile, of the hopes it brings and those it destroys. In Conques, music is omnipresent among them: they have headphones screwed to their ears, they improvise fragments of songs that often emerge in incongruous situations...

An idea is born. The idea of finding a language to make audible what seems unspeakable.

Then, in April 2018, we invited a musician friend, Mathias Duplessy, to come to Conques during one of our stays. There, for a short week, the LIMBO team and Mathias worked on songs with a few young people who volunteered to try putting them into words and music. The desire to sing gradually unlocks the impossibility of naming things: because before being able to sing, of course, one has to pronounce, then determine the right words.

Gradually, they find a rhythm. Under Cécile's benevolent eye, the young people reconnect with their past and put it into words. Then comes the time for music: after a long exchange with the young people, to feel and capture the music of their exile, Mathias composes a melody. This is how the young people, and in particular F. (author of "Où vais-je?"), wrote the first songs. We decided to document this experience in a film.

● A different voice but a common language

There are about ten of them who decided to take part in this adventure. Sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs, with a little help, they wrote the nine songs that mark out Songs of the Living. Each of these songs retraces, one after the other, the stages of the road to exile. The departure, the road, Libya, the crossing, the arrival, the trauma, the future... Together these young people have composed an anthem: the song of the survivors, a song of the living.

By writing a song that tells their story, Bailo, Egbal, Sophia, Victoria, Anas, David, Hervé, Zomuy, Michael, have left the shore of the dead. In this Song of the Living, they have found a way to simply say the pain of being alive and to extract something other than pain. They have found another way to move towards the clearing and tell their story; a musical way, slower, at times funny, pleasant. The resulting film is a way for the whole LIMBO team to share this experience.