Valérie Mréjen is of Jewish Moroccan origin; she was not interested in religion until her brother became religious and went to live in Israel. After several trips to Israel, she broached the religious question through talks with people who had broken away from their ultra-orthodox past. In this video, the conceptual framework is true to Mréjen's other work – it consists of a series of fixed shots of characters that are telling a story.

Made in Israel, this film makes people talk about their break with religion. Each person filmed in their own environment talks about the first time that they transgressed a religious prohibition. The weight of superstition is palpable in their delirious fear, during the moment of their transgression, expressed by supernatural images of God descending to earth or lightning coming to strike them. Besides religion, these very intense images may appear comic, given the archaic nature of the iconography. Nonetheless, these evocations clearly express the heavy press-ganging of their religious education.

This video announced a new path in Valérie Mréjen's work, at the limits of documentary. Until then she had worked on her close environment, on everyday situations. Here, a greater sense of distance is established with the protagonist and the speech is more measured, owing to the language barrier, but is still just as appropriate. The documentary Pork & Milk followed this video, continuing her investigation into the difficulty of breaking away from a religious environment and her exploration of the complexity of family relationships.

Patricia Maincent