Peter Nestler's poetic documentary Verteidigung der Zeit is not only an hommage to Jean-Marie Straub's and Danièle Huillet's film Quei loro incontri (2005), but also to their access to cinema itself. In various encounters and conversations Nestler offers an insight into their life and work, including passages from Italian poet Cesare Pavese.

Verteidigung der Zeit

Cocada and Nego are two boys in their early teens living in a small town in Pernambouc, Brazil. Cocada and Nego are half-brothers who live with their mother, stepfather and eight other siblings in a ramshackle house where the children are often left to care for themselves as their parents work. Filmmakers Jean-Pierre Duret and Andréa Santana spent some time with Cocada and Nego, and Puisque nous sommes nés is a documentary that offers a look at their lives as they struggle with poverty and dream of a happier future.

Because We Were Born

Today, countless French people of all ages find it hard making ends meet. We know virtually nothing about these lives, their innermost thoughts, their daily routine and their struggle to survive. Stigmatized by misleading and unfair descriptions, they are the dark and silent face of our society that we are gradually coming to accept. However, within them, they carry the desire for rebellion, their dreams, the lust for life and the words to express all that. Alone at their side, volunteers from charity organizations, a genuine shadow army, work selflessly for an idea of justice and the common good. Their united energies fuel the desire to go on living together and mark out a pathway of hope for all. Cinema's fragile gift is to place us at the heart of these fragments of existence, both offered to our gaze and yet so modest.