For more than 15 years, Antoine de Maximy has been traveling the world to meet people: armed with several cameras, the host invites himself to sleep with people to get to know them better and share good times. But sometimes this search for friendliness with locals can be very dangerous.
The man in the red shirt narrowly escaped kidnapping. A few years ago in La Paz, Bolivia, he had a bad encounter. “A woman pretending to be a cop wanted to take me on board to rob me. I didn’t allow myself to be fooled and the evening ended in a real police station with national TV channels who wanted to interview me”he said to Tele-Leisure. But once released, the troubles continued. “The problem is that friends of hers tracked me, hid in front of the home of an acquaintance who had hosted me outside filming and threatened her son”. How did this story end? “Nothing appears in the film, but I fled Bolivia in disaster. I slept at the French Embassy and spun to the airport lying in the back of a car…”.
In 2015, he was caught in a shooting on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia, located south of Martinique. While he was seated, on the terrace, with two interlocutors and commenting on the “peaceful” atmosphere of the country, shots rang out. If one of them speaks of a settling of accounts, Antoine de Maximy declared: “I don’t know at all what happened. I just regret not having made a shot of the whole bar which was emptying in ten seconds. I didn’t have the reflex to turn the camera” .
In Quebec, in the village of Inujjuaq, he met an Inuit under the influence of drugs who broke his camera. A trip that ended with a goal patched up with adhesive tape. And finally in Vanuatu, he felt threatened by the inhabitants of a village who demanded money to agree to host him. He finally gave in, feeling that things were turning sour.
This Friday, May 13 at 9:05 p.m., Antoine de Maximy will invite you to (re)discover on RMC Discovery a number of I’ll go to sleep at your place shot in South Korea. The globetrotter went to Gyeongju in the south of the country but also to the capital in Seoul. Places where he had a hard time communicating since the majority of the inhabitants only speak Korean…
See also: Antoine de Maximy at the heart of a shooting – I will go to sleep at your place – excerpt (07/17/15)
Adam Javal-Fauconnier