This Sunday, May 7, 2023, Samuel Benchetrit was the guest of Mohamed Bouhafsi in Focus on RTL. An opportunity for the husband of Vanessa Paradis to evoke his childhood in the neighborhoods and the image of which most people now have. “Me, I have become gentrified, I am now in Paris, but I have the impression that we are wiping our feet on my childhood”he laments. “I come from these neighborhoods. You never forget where you come from. My childhood was wonderful, it was hard sometimes, but like everyone else. There are also children who are born into very well-to-do backgrounds and who are unhappy, that’s not the problem”.
For the 49-year-old director, writer, screenwriter, playwright and actor, “there is a very powerful future in these neighborhoods. And if we don’t take care of it, inevitably, there is anger that will be born like in a family, if we don’t take care of one child at a time. At some point, he’s going to mess around, he’s going to feel rejected”he believes.
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“Jamel, Omar Sy, Ramzy”
Samuel Benchetrit is formal. “All the kids who come from these neighborhoods and who arrive there, we love them. All those who have accompanied us for years, who come from Trappes, Jamel, Omar Sy, my friend Ramzy, we really love them, they are wonderful, not just because they’re funny, but because they’re really smart and maybe they’ve figured out something else”. “Instead of denigrating them, we must encourage them”adds the filmmaker born in Champigny-sur-Marne in the early 1970s.
This is not the first time that Jules and Saul’s dad has opened up about his modest childhood “in city HLM”. Passing through C to you on April 12, Samuel Benchetrit had praised these places too often criticized in his eyes. “We say so much bad things about HLM housing estates all the time. We say a lot of bad things about them compared to what we could get out of them. And it’s not going that badly. There aren’t always people shooting Kalashnikovs out of the window”, he had launched. “I was very happy. I was playing football with my friends, there was solidarity, there was something… And it got tougher”. Tender confidences.
VB
️ The clichés about neighborhoods “it annoys me a lot because I feel like we’re wiping our feet on my childhood. There’s a very powerful future in these neighborhoods.” Samuel Benchetrit at the microphone of @mohamedbouhafsi In #FocusSunday ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/wfv8cHBJyn
—RTL France (@RTLFrance) May 7, 2023