(Cannes) “I didn’t make films to say ‘wait, you forgot this story’, but to talk about my people”: at 68, Rachid Bouchareb, who marked the Croisette in 2006 with Nativecontinues its exploration of French memory gaps with Our brothers.
Posted at 12:47 p.m.
Presented Monday evening, the film parallels the stories of Malik Oussekine and Abdel Benyahia, two young French people from North African immigration killed on December 6, 1986 in Paris and Pantin by police officers.
Two stories, two relatively forgotten destinies. While a series devoted to Malik Oussekine was broadcast two weeks ago on Disney +, is it the anniversary date, in October – 35 years – of the events that prompted the director to take an interest in the subject?
“It’s more the personal clock that started,” he told AFP. “I had wanted to do it for a long time, but I had other films to make before,” he continues.
According to him, if there has been, until now, no cinematographic adaptation of this drama, it is “because France is very late compared to the United States on questions of memory”.
“There are memory topics that are difficult and we have to wait until France is completely ready to talk about them. It may take some time,” he observes.
Pioneer
Born in 1953 in Paris and brought up in the suburbs of Paris, Rachid Bouchareb, whose parents are from Algeria, grew up alongside eight brothers and sisters. After professional training, he joined a film school with “full ideas for films in mind”.
After a first short film, he directed his first film Red Stick. But it was only a few years later, in 1991, that he rose to fame with Chebthe story of a young man expelled from France, where he has lived since he was a child, and who has to start from scratch, in Algeria, a country he does not know.
The film won the Prix de la jeunesse at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Oscar for best foreign language film. It is the beginning of a rich cinematographic production which follows a common thread: the memory of North African and African immigration.
“All of a sudden, you find yourself a pioneer because you say: there, there are only American films about the landing, but nothing next to it. Well, I’m going to do it on the side, ”he said.
“I didn’t make movies to say ‘wait, you forgot this story’, but to talk about my people,” he told AFP. Rather, I wanted to tell what I heard growing up, what I had seen with my own eyes […] And those things were also very cinematic.”
But if his films can have a positive impact on the lives of the people he portrays film after film, and if they make it possible to make these stories resonate in everyone’s head “then there, yes, it’s interesting”, judge- he.
A few years later, he made his mark again with Native (2006), the journey of forgotten soldiers of the first French army recruited in Africa which caused a sensation in Cannes and earned its performers a collective performance award.
In 2010, he tells, in Outlaw (2010), the story of three brothers against the backdrop of the Algerian war and finds Jamel Debbouze, Roschdy Zem and Sami Bouajila. The film, which opens with the massacres of Sétif, on May 8, 1945, creates controversy. It was presented the same year in competition at the Cannes Film Festival.
“Each time, the films trigger a whole movement […] we start a locomotive and the cinema is a locomotive,” he says when asked about the reception of his films.