HLM neighborhoods and estates have always been the subject of many clichés and often hit the headlines for their negative sides. Samuel Benchetrit, the companion of Vanessa Paradis, spent his childhood in a housing estate. The director took advantage of his time in “C to You” this Wednesday, April 12 to praise 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 defended against Anne-Elisabeth Lemoine. The one who replies to his muse in the play “Mom” does not stop there and reminds that he has “lived a wonderful childhood in a low-income housing estate”. “I was very happy. I was playing football with my friends, there was solidarity, there was something… And it got tougher”he continued.
Samuel Benchetrit, the companion of Vanessa Paradis, wants the look on the neighborhoods to change
If life in the neighborhoods and in the housing estates has hardened, it is because there has been “the arrival of drugs, there was communitarianism, there were plenty of things that happened and came to blacken all that”. Vanessa Paradis’ companion finds “a pity to always come and type (on the cities: editor’s note)”. For him, tapping on neighborhoods and HLM housing estates has become “systematic”. Especially since each Minister of the Interior “says to himself ‘oh well this is going to be the time when I will type on this, I will type on Roma, I will type on this’… It’s about every five years”.
The companion of Vanessa Paradis recalls, however, that there is still “kids in there who are certainly exciting”. Future artists, potential future politicians, for example. The director evokes the most telling example in his eyes: “I always like to say ‘it’s the cities that won the World Cup in 1998’ because there were a lot of them that came from there”. Aware that there is a lot of violence in the neighborhoods, he would like to see him luck, because “there is not just that !”
RF