Romain Schneid

Symphonie mixes fiction with reality. The author, Romain Schneid, tells the story of his own claustrophobia in front of the camera when, when he was 12 years old, hiding as a Jew during the German occupation, he could not leave a tiny apartment. He tells and he plays alone all the characters in his drama. He invents, deforms, imagines another end. He is at the same time the author, the narrator and the actor (the actors). Did he really experience what he's talking about, or did all that happen in his head? Are we facing a testimony or a delusion?

"It's a very simple story, shot in a quiet street in Brussels. People waiting for the bus that is late, talking to each other, trusting each other, talking about the weather and giving each other practical tips. It is life as it is, in its troubling banality, that Van Antwerpen shows us. " (Luc Honorez, Le Soir, 1974).

With a keen awareness of his mentally ill condition, René Paquot denounces all powers, and especially the practices of psychiatric hospitals, which he compares to those used in slaughterhouses: submission through medication, straitjackets, and extermination by electroshock. This film should be seen as a cry of revolt.