Shusho et Muhammad Farag sont deux enfants, presque du même âge vivant et travaillant dans le monde des tanneries. Le premier travaille sur une charette (tirée par un cheval ou un âne) et le second est ouvrier dans l'une des tanneries. A travers leurs histoires, nous voyons un groupe de jeunes enfants travailleurs de différents métiers...

Un film de Ahmed Fawzi Saleh

Egypte, 2010, Documentaire, 56 mins. HDCAM

Réalisateur/Scénariste : Fawzi Saleh / فوزى صالح

NOTE OF THE PROGRAMMER
Director Fawzi Saleh's debut feature, Living Skin is an unflinching investigation into the dire living and working conditions of children employed in the manufacture of natural leather products in Cairo. The film is set in Magra el-‘Uyun, a neighborhood in the heart of the old city that claims an impressive aggregation of slaughterhouses, and where more than half of the 80,000-strong labor force - a large proportion of whom are children under 15 - is unregistered.
Poverty, homelessness and the threat of starvation push droves of children in Egypt to leave school and give up their ambitions and their dreams of living with even a modicum of security, let alone dignity or the rarefied privilege of shaping their own destinies. They are absorbed into the ravenously labor-hungry, ruthlessly unsupervised manufacturing sectors, living their childhood on the physically draining production line, handling dangerous chemicals like sodium sulfate, sulfuric acid, and hydrogen peroxide without appropriate protection.
Living Skin is a poignant reference to these tannery workers, who "process' the skin of livestock after they have been "processed' in slaughterhouses - and whose own living skin is exposed to the same chemical regimen as the skin of dead livestock. Saleh's foray into socially engaged documentary cinema is uninhibited. It commands our undivided attention. - Rasha Salti
www.sanadfilmfund.com/en/archive/2010/film-details?ID=4163

Prod : Al Batrik Production (Mahmoud Hemeida, producteur) / البطريق للانتاج الفنى - محمود حميدة
avec le soutien de SANAD FILM FUND