Émilie Deleuze's Peau Neuve (New Skin) was developed out of a year-long visit to an Adult Education and Training Centre for men who require certain skills to operate heavy machinery on construction sites. With three shorts and a TV feature to her credit, she was looking for a theme for her first feature that would be cut directly from working life and filmed on natural locations, but with an extra twist to set it apart from docudrama and the fiction-documentary.

"It's sometimes impossible to explain why on one day, at one moment, life becomes unbearable," says Deleuze, "why someone decides to change his life. It isn't an unbearable

situation in itself, but it has become unbearable to him. To take on a new skin becomes then an intimate 'metamorphosis' that nothing external needs to be explained."

The 'dropout' is Alain (Samuel Le Bihan), 30 years old, married, and the father of a pre-school daughter. His everyday job is about as demeaning as it can get: he has to test video games. After consulting an employment agency, he finds he can qualify for a four-month training course in Corrèze, far from Paris in the heart of France, where he will join a couple of hundred other trainees from various cultural and national backgrounds.

There Alain meets Manu (Marcial De Fonzo Bo), "a child with an old guy's face", who doesn't follow any codes, play specific roles, or copy anyone else. Rather, he's an 'idiot' in the Dostoyevsky mold, a kind of noble creature who can see through people and yet remain a mystery himself. As Alain says at one stage in their budding relationship: "I would like to hit him, but at the same time I would follow him to the end of the world." Manu also happens to like machines - a skill that helps in turn to neutralise the violence about them. Ron Holloway