The girls with the yellow hands

When asked about her artistic choices, director Johanna Boyé spontaneously mentions her taste for portraits of women. In 2020, Est-ce que j'ai une gueule d'Arletty? won two Molières awards. Following her star, she is now tackling four portraits that are really one: that of the generation of women of 14, thrown to the front of the armament factories to feed the barbarity of men. Julie, Rose, Jeanne and Louise are these "girls with yellow hands", skins saturated with the explosives they handle and which silently undermine their bodies, day after day. Can the collective word succeed in naming this evil? Michel Bellier's text dissects the brutality of the chain and the paradoxical hopes born in reaction to the war. Concern for the men (a husband, a fiancé, a child), sharing of solidarity, feminist ideas... Fear of change too, that a political awareness could bring. Where the cause of emancipation is superimposed on generational and social fractures... With a quartet of powerful performers, this collective performance offers a remarkable picture of another time in the struggle of women, a century ago; so far away, so close.