Blame Roger Kahn. As a fledgling reporter Kahn was assigned to 'cover' the Brooklyn Dodgers in the early fifties, which meant he travelled with the team, roomed with them from Spring Training through to the end of the season. Thirty years later he thought it might be interesting to find out what had become of the individual players so he sought them out, interviewed them at length and published his findings as The Boys Of Summer, one of the finest books about baseball ever written by anyone anywhere. Thirty years ago Nicolas Philbert was a fledgling filmmaker who worked on a film made on location in Normandy and utilised real natives as opposed to actors to relate the facts of a real triple murder in the nineteenth century. Thirty years later Philbert went back to Normandy to trace the non-actors who appeared in the film and his findings comprise his latest film Back To Normandy. It defies categorization melding travelogue with philosophy, metaphysics and nostalgia into a richly satisfying whole that perhaps falls just a tad short of his wonderful Etre et Avoir which did for the Auvergne what this latest effort does for Normandy. I doubt if it will play many Multiplexes or 'speak' to the bubblegum crowd but that's their loss.
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