Laurent Helas

The Strawman

A simple and quiet young man, Ruben faces the ups and downs of his life. But now, in the family, the “lame duck” is his brother. He allowed himself to be drawn by a gang of thugs into a high-risk enterprise. After being badly beaten in a beating, he finds himself between life and death. Fatally invested with a brotherly duty, Ruben goes to find the thugs to try to remove them from his "brother" and put an end to this story. But what was supposed to be an end turns out to be a nightmarish departure.

The Night Just Before the Forests

Using all the words he can find, a man tries to get a stranger to stay around—a stranger he approached on a street corner, one night when he was alone. He tells him about his world. A suburb where it rains, where everyone is a stranger, where no one works anymore; a nocturnal world that he is passing through, to flee, without looking back; he tells him about everything and about love, things one never talks about, except to a stranger like this one, a child perhaps, silent and motionless.