NON-FICTION | 4 EPISODES | 2025

The lives and struggles of the dockworkers at the port of Dunkirk

“I was born in 1988, one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall and three years before the collapse of the Soviet Union. I grew up hearing everywhere that capitalism had won. That there were no alternatives to neoliberalism. That the future lay in economic deregulation, the privatization of public services, and the relocation of factories. I grew up in Cantal, one of the most rural departments in France. Suffice to say that I didn’t really know what workers were like.

But when I was old enough to understand what was being said in the media and to take an interest in history, one question kept coming back to me: where has the working class gone?

In 2014, I began to find the answer. I met a small group of former dockworkers in Dunkirk. There was François, Georges, and Louis. Their story struck me. It was as if they were the missing link. The link connecting the working class of the 20th century to the social movements of the 21st century. The piece I was missing.

Like me, many people of my generation and subsequent generations grew up without any representation of the working class. Today, workers are desperately absent from our media. As a result, there has been no transmission. That’s why I think it’s essential to take a step back and tell these stories and make these voices heard. To understand where we are today politically and to rebuild our imaginations in order to resist the fascism that is coming.”

Antoine Tricot