“Returning to Reims” steps on the hot front opened by the French proletarian archives of the last century, starting with the moment when, thanks to technical progress, they have become filmable, and ending at the edge of the present. The movie is a lax adaptation of philosopher Didier Eribon’s penetrating sociological essay, a bestseller in several European countries, where he examines his process of becoming a homosexual within the working-class family environment. Corroborating this personal testimony with the audiovisual traces of the popular past, Jean-Gabriel Périot (“A German Youth”) embraces, through an ambitious filmmaker-archaeologist’s gesture, the proletarian resistance during World War II and the May 68 revolts, the new social housing neighbourhoods, and the recent Yellow Vests movement. A counter-history thus takes shape, animated by renowned actress Adèle Haenel’s voice, where the marginalized and the dispossessed of the official narrative of triumphant capitalism take a curtain call, in the name of a just ideal they knew how to keep alive through struggle and perseverance. (Victor Morozov)