Staff Writer Gigi Silla covers a virtual event hosted Wednesday by Columbia University’s Maison Française

Watching Claus Drexel’s 2014 documentary Au bord du monde (At The Edge Of The World) is like turning over a stone and discovering on the other side an entire world, previously invisible, teeming with life and overflowing with complexities. The film follows a variety of people living on the streets of Paris over the course of a year. Mr. Drexel, the director of the film, and his collaborators highlight the day to day lives of Paris’s unhoused citizens, offering a glimpse into their overlooked world. The documentary departs from more common narratives that focus on potential solutions to housing crises or that emphasize the social or financial conditions that lead to homelessness. 

Mr. Drexel spoke about his film at a virtual event on Wednesday afternoon, hosted by Columbia University’s Dr. Shanny Peer and moderated by Dr. Frédéric Viguier of New York University. At the event, organized by Columbia University’s Maison Française, Mr. Drexel alluded to the French children’s book The Little Prince, about a young prince who travels to a series of planets. Mr. Drexel likened himself to the protagonist, dropping in on an unfamiliar place, and seeking to learn, without judgment, how the people of that world live, earning their trust by returning daily and thus moving a little closer into their orbit. 

Indeed, the documentary casts a light on a kind of parallel universe, the Paris that exists between the hours of 1:30 and 5:30 in the morning, when the Metro is closed and the streets are empty, save for the people who make those streets their living quarters. In the background of many shots stand structures essential to Parisian urban identity, familiar to almost any viewer, from the Arc de Triomphe, to the Eiffel Tower, to the low, sloping bridges over the Seine. These staples of Paris’s built environment have come to symbolize the city’s power and glamor, and they are thrown into sharp relief against the documentary’s foreground of poverty.

At the event on Wednesday, Mr. Drexel emphasized that he wanted to make a beautiful film about homelessness. That is not to say he wanted to romanticize homelessness, but rather that he wanted to provide an aesthetic value to the documentary that is so often lacking in media about poverty and social ills. We’ve come to expect that stories about poor people are made with few resources and therefore have an unpolished quality to them, Mr. Drexel said. He posed the question of why we should not expect the same beauty and care in filmmaking when the subjects are homeless, as we would if the subjects were aristocracy. 

In Au bord du monde, the camera always sits at the same level as the subject, whether that be on a bench or on the ground. Its gaze maintains a kind of distance, denying the viewer close-ups of faces or interior shots of tents and makeshift shacks. Despite this physical distance, the documentary cultivates a feeling of quiet intimacy, an effect achieved through patient, stationery shots, capturing a subject taking the steps of a motionless escalator one at a time, capturing the almost microscopic crackle of a subject’s long drag on their cigarette. 

No question is too frank within the purview of the film. Mr. Drexel, behind the camera, asks his subjects about their families, about their sex and love lives, about where they find joy, about how much money they need to get by in a day, further adding to the film’s feeling of intimacy. 

The goal of the documentary, Mr. Drexel said, is to give voice to Paris’s unhoused community, a population that too often is spoken over and for, by everyone from politicians to social workers. However, lacking from the film, Mr. Drexel acknowledged, are unhoused people living in Paris who are not from France. Although the film includes one man from Romania, Mr. Drexel explained that the language barrier was most often too great an obstacle to fully and authentically depict unhoused Parisians who did not speak fluent French in the documentary. 

Mr. Drexel’s film is a compelling departure from typical documentaries on the issue of homelessness, both in content and style. He brings us to the edge of the world as we know it, to the edge of the Paris familiar to most viewers, and opens a window into a too-often overlooked realm.

The recording of Wednesday’s event is available on the Maison Française website, and the film is available online through February 8th.

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