(In)Voluntary Retirements

On July 2nd, 2008, at five thirty in the afternoon, a 53-year-old man called Jean-Michel was run over by a train in Saint-Lyé, a town with a population of 3,000 located in the east of France. No one knew whether it was a suicide or an accident. The director investigates around the town, asks different inhabitants what they think of that tragedy. For many people, Jean-Michel had killed himself, after amassing too many worries and problems; the more the voiceover asks, the more mysterious it all gets. But there is a detail from Jean-Michel’s life that connects him to Argentina—he had been an employee at a phone company until a privatization left him without a job. (In)Voluntary Retirements is a documentary that shows how the kinship between Argentina’s politics in the ‘90s and France’s twenty years later damaged the lives of so many people.