Sylvie Weil is a lawyer. For nearly ten years she has been giving legal advice for free, once a week in the Bondy town hall (on the outskirts of Paris). She’s often told me stories about the people she tries to help and their problems involving legal proceedings, people “ on the razor’s edge ”. One day I went with her.
And I saw Sylvie alert and attentive, listening and trying to offer these people in distress the beginnings of a solution. This tiny office is a meeting place for people cast out by the system – people on the dole, divorced, expelled, foreigners. And it seemed to me an ideal place for questioning our society and reviewing the citizens’ access to the legal system. Legal proceedings are too expensive, impersonal and usually inaccessible to those who need the most.