meeting with Adnane Tragha, director of the documentary “We grew up together” on the Gagarin city

In We grew up together, the director Adnane Tragha filmed with a certain poetry the ruins of a bygone past and collected the testimonies of former inhabitants of the red brick fortress of the Gagarin city, just before its demolition in 2020. We wanted to know more about his motivations and how he made this documentary. He spoke to us about his desire to re-humanize the inhabitants of the neighborhoods, his desire to show inspiring models, and his refusal to compromise which pushes him to work in total independence.

How was this documentary born?
Adnane Tragha : I lived just opposite Gagarin, quoted Truillot, until 2004. I had one foot inside, one foot outside, since I had many friends of Gagarin. But I am one of those who fled, as soon as they could, what the neighborhood represented. As I still live in Ivry, and my father lived in Cité Truillot until his death in 2020, I still go there regularly. When I learned that the Cité Gagarin was going to be destroyed, it did something to me because it was emblematic of both the district and Ivry. At that time, artistic projects were born: there was a feature film, a play, a photo exhibition, but I couldn’t find the neighborhood I knew there. So I wanted to tell it from my point of view.

Why was it important that someone from the neighborhood made this film?
I don’t feel more legitimate than anyone else. If someone outside tells our stories well, why not? Except that when we have experienced them, we will perhaps tell things more fairly and with more emotion. Making this documentary brought up a lot of emotions, sometimes I wanted to cry. This film is for me a duty of memory. It’s important to leave a mark. All these immigrants from our parents’ generation who arrived in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and who are in the process of disappearing have been invisible. They are faceless, dehumanized. I wanted to tell not a general story but specific life trajectories. I also wanted to show with this film what the young people from the estates who were talked about a lot in the 90s have become. We see that we must let time do its work. These young people who did not feel French, these young people who did a bit of nonsense, most of them have studied, have great jobs, children, families and they live their lives quietly.

How did you choose the actors for the film?
I’m not here to say that everything is great in the neighborhoods but I prefer to show what is beautiful. So I did not choose the social cases of the district, I especially took inspiring figures. Like Samira, a friend’s little sister, who went to Harvard, which doesn’t make her a freak. I did the Sorbonne, I have bac +5, and we were full of cities to come. But we never talk about that. When it comes to estates, we always show what’s wrong, what’s scary, we focus on the twenty enraged guys who want to smash everything. We never talk about the hundreds of others who study and do everything to get there. Me, I wanted to show what unites and makes you want to rise. Because what made me want to make films was the rap I listened to in the 90s, which pushed me to open books. NTM, Assassin, IAM, MC Solaar, Fabe: they quoted such and such an author, that interested me. In his song Meteca and MateAkhenaten said:No heroes in our image, only mobsters / Identification gives an army of stinking jackals.“Basically, by dint of talking about suburban cailleras, the kids want to be cailleras. I work a lot on models, I try at my little level to give positive and motivating models.

What struck you the most while talking to Gagarin alumni?
First of all, it is their attachment to the city. And the traces she left on them. They are marked for life by the neighborhood, but in the good sense of the term, they only get the positive, the solidarity, the mutual aid. Yet it was a tough city. For Loïc, for example, who grew up in a two-room apartment with his mother and two or three sisters. In terms of intimacy in adolescence, it was complicated! This is the reason why some find themselves squatting the halls, because they have nowhere to go.

In your way of filming and in the small stagings that you allow yourself, have you tried to soften the depressing side of the city?
A few years ago I saw the documentary The supplication by Luxembourg director Paul Cruchten (released in 2016, this film features testimonies from survivors of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster). This film is very beautiful. After seeing it, I said to myself, if I make a film about my people, where I grew up, it has to be super beautiful in visual terms. It also comes from my state of mind: during filming, I learned that my father, who has since died, had pancreatic cancer. It further accentuates the nostalgic side, which goes through the tone of my voice. But we could only be nostalgic: we filmed in the completely empty city! People from the OPH came to open us in the morning and they locked us in the housing estate for the day. It was a giant film studio just for us. With incredible sets and artists, musicians, graffiti artists, who came to work in parallel and thanks to whom we were able to film some super beautiful things. Regarding the small stagings, it was to give rhythm. I come from the side of what the Americans call Edutainment (contraction of Education and Entertainment Editor’s note), ie educating while having fun: it was system D but it had to slap.

Gagarin was a red city, “a city of proletarians socialized around the PCF at the end of the 80s”, you say in the film. Your mention of the Communist Party is quite nuanced.
The communists did a lot of things for Gagarin and until recently I voted communist, like my father, who was a Moroccan resistance fighter alongside Ben Barka. At the municipal level I still vote for them but I also criticize them. At the time, the communists did not accept that the young people who had created the CCI (Convergence Citoyenne Ivryienne, which is today part of the municipal majority Ed.) become politicized. We experienced this again recently with the NUPES, which did not allow activists from working-class neighborhoods to present themselves under the NUPES label. They preferred to parachute people out of nowhere. In the same way, Mélenchon who did not represent himself in Marseille in the legislative elections, preferred to place Manuel Bompard rather than taking a pure Marseillais who had experience on the spot.

You have been working on your films entirely independently from the start, including your first feature film 600 euro. What continues to motivate you, and where does your fierce refusal to compromise come from?
Niaque comes from the fact that I have things to tell and that I want to tell them as I hear. The refusal to compromise is my ego too, I have my pride, I don’t like begging too much. Cinema is an impregnable fortress. So I built my house, my production and distribution company, Les Films qui cause, to be able to produce and release my films completely independently. I’m ready to play the game but not ready for everything, not ready to compromise myself to make films. I just want to tell mine honestly and objectively. And then it’s not the financiers, people who have always had a job, a permanent contract, who don’t know what it’s like to take personal risks, who are going to decide whether I make a film or not. “For us, By us” as African Americans say. It takes determination, it comes from my father. It’s exhausting, we don’t have help, we do DIY, but everyone gets paid.

In your opinion, what is the quality or strength best shared by people who grew up in a city?
The main strength is solidarity. When one person has a problem, it becomes someone else’s problem. It’s like a rope of mountaineers: if one of them slips, everyone risks falling, so we hold them back. We are together. The first quality is an unfailing determination. Because in general, when you grew up in a city, you have already been through a lot of hard things, you had to prove yourself and climb mountains to get out of it. If I have an aspiration in relation to this film, it is that it be perceived as a film about working-class neighborhoods and not about a particular city. The documentary has already been previewed in Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône, Romainville, Bagnolet, Savigny-le-Temple, Montpellier, Toulouse, and each time, in these different neighborhoods, people in the public told us: it’s like at home, it’s great, it reminds us of ourselves. That’s the point. We grew up together, but we grew up socially together too because what we see there is that despite the difficulties, they got through it and we all went through the same thing.

The documentary “We grew up together” by Adnane Tragha has been in theaters since September 21, 2022. The director has published a richly illustrated book on the same subject with JC Lattès editions.