Let yourself be transported between present and future with the Destination G2084 podcast

PROLOGUE :

Claire leaves for Valenciennes, full of hopes and doubts.

FOSSE D’ARENBERG: Stupor and rockslides

At the Wallers-Arenberg mining site, Claire meets Jean, the hologram of a miner who worked there at the beginning of the twentieth century. He offers to take her down “to the bottom”. She follows him through the maze of galleries, listening to his story, when suddenly she has the fright of her life.

CORON DES 120: Body and chorus

For her stay in the Valenciennes region, Claire has booked a room in the former coron des 120. When she arrives, she’s surprised to learn that she’ll be sharing the accommodation with its inhabitants, Jo and Leïla. As she comes into contact with them, she discovers a different way of life, and takes a liking to it.

TERRIL RENARD: Mountains and wonders

Climbing the Terril Renard, a veritable green bubble and biodiversity reserve, Claire is lured by Blue, a mysterious young woman who leads her into a clearing to witness a disconcerting event.

CITÉ THIERS: Grandeur and progress

Dreaming of real sets for her film, Claire meets 3D printer Charlie at Cité Thiers. She’s thrilled to discover the innovations he’s working on. But in the workshop, things don’t go according to plan.

FRESNES STATION: Network and refuge

Riding her solar-powered bike along the greenway, Claire stumbles across a citizen’s estaminet set up in the old station. There she meets Aïssa, a committed woman. This encounter will influence the way Claire’s project continues to take shape.

EPILOGUE :

Claire is reluctant to leave.

5 emblematic mining sites

Le Coron des 120 in Anzin & Valenciennes, Fresnes-sur-Escaut railway station, La cité Thiers, Le terril Renard in Demain, Wallers-Arenberg mining site.

5 sites spread over the territory of the former Compagnie des Mines d’Anzin. Covering an area of 28,000 hectares, the concessions of the Compagnie des Mines d’Anzin are the largest in the Nord-Pas de Calais mining basin. A pioneering company, the cradle of coal mining and constantly expanding its fields of exploration and exploitation, the company has made this territory its own for two centuries, transforming it profoundly. Today, coal mining in the Anzin basin has left behind several heritage areas that correspond to different eras and/or logics. Natural and rural landscapes have been superimposed by production and housing infrastructures. Valenciennes was the first company to build mining housing around 1810, and 79 of its housing estates (corons, housing estates and garden estates) can still be seen today.

5 nod to Germinal!

All the locations have an obvious connection with Germinal, the novel, Berri’s film and David Hourrège’s series.

But the choice of the anticipation fiction genre is a conscious one, to break with Germinal’s “backward-looking” side, with this tendency to always bring everything back to the past, however prestigious it may be! Germinal, Zola’s best-selling mining novel, has always raised many questions. Is it pure fiction or a literary documentary? The author didn’t depict reality 100%, but used fiction to keep readers on the edge of their seats. Setting the plot in the future is a way of showing the reality and present evolution of the mining basin.

David Hourrègue’s Germinal series

28 years after Claude Berri’s last film adaptation, the best-known work in Émile Zola’s Rougon Macquart saga made its way to the small screen in autumn 2021 (France 2). And it was in the form of a six-episode, 52-minute series, directed by David Hourrègue from a script by Julien Lilti.

The cast included tried-and-tested actors and promising new talents, as well as actors from the region and over a hundred extras from the Hauts-de-France region, of all ages and from all walks of life, some of whom had already worked on Berri’s 1993 film, driven by the desire to pay tribute to the thousands of miners who sweated blood and water for so many years in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region.

Natural settings were also preserved or restored for the needs of the series, such as the chapel of Saint-Nicolas and the hamlet of Marchipont in the Aunelle valley, which became the on-screen village of Montsou… everything was done to make us feel out of time and plunged into the heart of the 19th century.

Other locations were transformed by expert decorators. The old railway station at Fresnes-sur-Escaut, for example, became the estaminet “l’Avantage” for the filming.