CUTLER: At times it seems like a horror film. What are the specific immigration laws that the film refers to?

KLOTZ: I can give a precise example for the character of Julio (Winson Calixte). We worked in Lyon with a lawyer who is helping immigrants without papers, and she said that since Sarkozy became president, with the politics that they have been doing, the laws, asking the police to get quotas, everything has been accelerated and it is getting much more difficult for immigrant families. And they discovered new sicknesses through the children of these families, and one of these sicknesses that arrived with Sarkozy is narcolepsy. Children falling asleep because of their fear. And that was something that she was very anguished about. It is not something that was in the books or newspapers, it was something she heard many times in the families she was helping. Something in today’s air in France provokes it. Julio was arrested. He is a minor, he is 15, and he was arrested in the Metro. The police ask him his papers, so he gives his paper that specify that he is a minor, but they don’t believe that. If they can prove that he is 17, they can expel him. So they bring him to the hospital and they make bone tests with X-rays, and they look at his teeth and at his genitals. Which are the same things they were doing in the 30s. And they said that he was 17 and not 15. So from this moment he starts falling asleep. And it’s like, he said, as if the machines in the hospital went into his body and put a spell on him. That’s one of the many reasons for the voodoo that moves around the film. Getting the spell out of his papers. Julio takes the spell out of his papers by burning his papers. This is to tell you how very concrete laws and police methods make very concrete things happen in the fiction, generating form.