Trajectoire(s), mémoires d’enfance exilée

An immersive and moving experience of migration for all ages.

A story of long-distance friendship between two football fans, Erion and Sarah. They are best friends and live in Kosovo.

Erion has to leave Kosovo for France: “Because it was my parents’ choice”. Sarah gives him her telephone number on a small piece of paper on the bus station platform: “Say, Erion, you’re not going to forget me, are you? Friendship transcends borders. But the bottle of water leaked into the rucksack and the last digits of Sarah’s number were erased….

Arriving in Perrache, Lyon, the cacophony of languages, feeling far from everything. But in the midst of it all, there’s one universal language that they can use to forge new friendships: football. But above all, to find Sarah’s number!

In Trajectoire(s), Pauline Noblecourt-Berjon claims to be a collaborative writer. Writing with, not from, what these children say, and in so doing giving them the tools to tell their stories and reinvent them. The writing process involved the author working with a class of allophone pupils on several occasions. So the schoolchildren are real co-authors, at every stage: inventing and choosing the story, writing the dialogue, proofreading… Their imaginations, their sensibilities and their stories form the matrix of this tale in several voices. It’s a story of long-distance friendship between two football fans from France and Kosovo.