The new “Arab of the future” by Riad Sattouf, the rise of Donald Trump in the cinema, and the story of the zombies at Quai Branly

In Tout Public on Tuesday October 8, 2024, Riad Sattouf for “Me, Fadi, the stolen brother”, the director Ali Abbasi for the release of the biopic “The Apprentice”, and the “Zombis” exhibition at the Quai Branly museum.

While we thought that the saga of The Arab of the future had reached its end with the sixth volume, Riad Sattouf had not said everything about his family history and published the following: Me, Fadi, the stolen brother. This time, the reader is confronted with the darkest side of the story, where we follow the story of his brother kidnapped as a child and taken to Syria by his father.

Riad Satouff confided to Tout Public that the project to tell this story dates back to the moment when he found his brother Fadi, and that he was able to have the answers to the questions he asked himself. “There was something untold about my brother’s story when he told me about itexplains the cartoonist about this project kept secret for years. I didn’t know how to bring that, how to make it intelligible to people. And I wanted there to be the first six volumes of The Arab of the futurebefore telling Fadi’s story.”

Through this new series of the saga, the author also wanted to tell the story of childhood, and its ability to adapt to the most tragic situations.

It’s melancholic to think that ultimately a little child adapts to everything, in every situation, in every society (…), in all the environments of life into which he will find himself thrown.

Riad Sattouf

at franceinfo

From this point of view, Riad Sattouf remains an author of the intimate, which in no way detracts from his political significance. He explains in fact that he is free from any ideological attachment by creating, in order to tell the story of life in “chiaroscuro”making it “full of doubts”which allows us to approach “of a certain ‘truth'”.

The one who wanted to bring complexity to fiction to be as close as possible to reality is also the director Ali Abassi for his biopic The Apprenticewhich traces the rise of Donald Trump in New York in the 1970s. “It is precisely this complexity that makes the film interesting to makebelieves the Iranian-Danish director. If the idea is that he was an asshole who becomes an even worse asshole, it’s not a film, it’s hot air. (…) The reality is not so simple.”

Through this biopic, Ali Abassi is neither a mystification of Donald Trump nor a satire, but the story of the exceptional destiny of the former American president and presidential candidate, while revealing the less grandiose side of its trajectory. A release date on the big screen which is not insignificant, since it takes place four weeks before the American election. Available in theaters in France from Wednesday October 9, 2024.

The “Zombis” exhibition opens at the Quai Branly museum this Tuesday, October 8, 2024. The objective is to return “at the sources”that is to say the zombie in the voodoo religion in Haiti, and to deconstruct the Hollywood myth, explains the curator of the exhibition and anthropologist Philippe Charlier. In this way, the public is led to discover the Voodoo religion and its ritual objects.

Far from the representation of the zombie coming from Haiti, the figure of the zombie in pop culture has become “a metaphor of contagious death which is much closer to the vampire of Central Europe”analyzes Philippe Charlier. The zombie in pop culture, in cinema, and in Hollywood in particular, seems in fact more to embody the anxieties of an era and of society, than to pay homage to what constitutes its source. This is what Perrine Quennesson, an expert on the figure of the zombie in cinema, explains on the air. She explains that the zombie embodies society’s fears as it evolves.

“The zombie body becomes a social body onto which we project our fears and anxieties.”

Perrine Quennesson

franceinfo

This is without forgetting the comic potential of the zombie, which, by turning it ridiculous, becomes “a way to play with our fears”. This is the case with comedy. Shaun of the Dead by Edgar Wright made in 2004, which has just been restored and will be shown in preview at the Les Cinq Caumartin cinema in Paris, Thursday October 10, 2024. A conversation will follow between our two speakers, Perrine Quennesson and Patrice Chavalier .

A program with the participation of Augustin Arrivé, Matteu Maestracci, and Anne Chépeau, journalists in the culture department of franceinfo.