Public Story
berni
Summary
With this very personal project, which we will continue until my father's death, I believe I am doing the work of bringing children and parents closer together which is something my father did not experience with his mother. The end of Dorothée's life was the starting point for this series.
Using 35mm or 50mm film, as a reporter, I document my father's new life, without his mother.Without artifice or make-up, who is my father, what has he become?
On January 7, 1950, my father was born to pharmacist parents in post-war Bordeaux.
He doesn't often talk about his childhood. Out of modesty I imagine. Was it "too" perfect?He was an only child, with a sharp and curious gaze, a determined man.
In the photographs of his adolescence, his resemblance to Jacques Brel strikes me.
My grandmother's remarrying will give him his eternal feeling of abandonment. "I have never trusted women again," he recently conceded to me.
In 1959, Brel recorded his hit "Ne me quitte pas". I can only imagine that song echoing in my father's teenager head.
In May 1968, the students were in the streets and General de Gaulle, much appreciated by my father, was in a deadlock. After having experienced the reform of the country, my father began his law studies.
He eventually became a lawyer in 1977 and married my mum six years later.
My grandmother, proud of his pleadings, kept articles about him that appeared in the newspapers.
He once confided to me that he thanks God every day for having given him his three children.
Big mouth, sailor, survivor of a heart attack and cancer, honorary lawyer, my father, who we call Berni, lost his mother on 8 February 2021.
Does one's adulthood begin with the disappearance of his mother?
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