Kamel Saleh: “I’ve Paid the Price for My Freedom”

For those who know the history of French rap mainly through the people who held the mic, the name Kamel Saleh may be worth revisiting. A director, screenwriter, actor and now author, the Marseille native is one of those who helped create the images of an era that would go on to become foundational.

By the late 1980s, he was already talking cinema with Akhenaton. He bought a camera on credit, started filming, and would later direct several videos for IAM, including Demain c’est loin, Nés sous la même étoile and La Face B. He then co-directed Comme un aimant with Akhenaton, before moving on to documentaries, Plan B, and later Rapsodie, a hybrid project spanning film, music and live performance.

Today, Kamel Saleh has also turned to writing with Je viens gâcher la fête. But from the very beginning, perhaps the medium has changed more than his obsession: rejecting conventional language, ready-made representations and the same old clichés too easily served up about Marseille, working-class neighbourhoods, rap and cinema.

IAM: When History Was Still the Present

First of all, how did you actually meet Akhenaton? You were already talking a lot about cinema before you even started working with IAM. What brought the two of you together at that time?

I met Akhenaton in Marseille, at a time when we were still very young. And pretty quickly, we realised that we shared something when it came to cinema.

We could talk about films for hours, but not just about the films themselves: directing, characters, ways of telling a story, what cinema said about the city…

I was already completely drawn to images and cinema. He had this incredibly strong musical and cinematic culture. We had references in common, but we also had different perspectives, and I think that was what brought us together.

At that point, I wasn’t thinking: “I’m going to work with IAM.” We were mainly two guys from Marseille talking about cinema, music and what we wanted to do. And gradually, cinema became a language we shared.

That’s how things happened: quite naturally, before there was even really a professional project behind it.

I’m going to ask you what is probably a slightly naive question: when you were filming IAM during the L’École du micro d’argent era, were you aware that you were taking part in something that would become so important? Or when you’re right in the middle of it, do you simply not see History being written?

No, not really. When you’re in the middle of it, you don’t see History being written.

You know something is happening. You can feel there’s a particular energy around IAM, that the group is moving to another level. But you can’t know that, twenty or thirty years later, the images you’re shooting are still going to be there.

Back then, I was filming. That was it. I was focused on what was in front of me, on the images, the track, the people.

And maybe that’s precisely what gives some of those images their value. They were made in the present, with the means we had, with the energy of that moment.

Looking back, of course, I understand much more clearly what that period represented. But at the time, we were simply doing things. And I think that’s often how History is made: the people living through it don’t necessarily know they’re making it.

When you watch Demain c’est loin or Nés sous la même étoile today, do you still see your music videos, or do you now see them as archives of an era?

Today, I see both.

I still see my videos, because I remember exactly how certain images were made, where I was, what I was looking for. When I watch Demain c’est loin, I see the young director I was at that time.

But obviously, over time, those images have become something else. They’ve become traces of a Marseille that doesn’t quite exist anymore, of an era, a way of experiencing the city, a generation.

And it’s quite strange, because at the time I wasn’t filming the past. I was filming my present.

It’s only years later that you realise you were also filming an era.

So today, when I watch them, there are two perspectives: the director who still wonders whether an image works… and the person looking at an archive and thinking: “Fuck, we were there.”

Comme un aimant: Telling the Story of Marseille Without Turning It Into a Postcard

With Comme un aimant, which you co-directed with Akhenaton, you were already rejecting a certain representation of Marseille. You didn’t film the postcard version of the city, nor did you simply portray it as a city of gangsters. From the outset, was the project also about taking back control of the way your city and its neighbourhoods were portrayed?

We didn’t start out saying to ourselves, “We’re going to take back control of the narrative around Marseille.” It was much more instinctive than that.

We simply wanted to tell the story of the Marseille we knew. What we had lived. And obviously, when you come from certain neighbourhoods, you know that the image people have of your city is often extremely limited: either the postcard, the Old Port, the sunshine, the sea… or criminals, violence and gangland killings.

But Marseille is neither one nor the other.

With Comme un aimant, we wanted to show the people, their relationships, the neighbourhoods, the codes, the humour, the solidarity, but also the harshness. And above all, we didn’t want to explain Marseille to people who didn’t know it. We simply wanted to film it from the inside.

Maybe that was what really mattered: not manufacturing a Marseille for cinema, but bringing our Marseille into cinema.

And looking back, yes, I think it also helped shift the way people looked at the city a little. But at the beginning, our ambition was much simpler: to tell the story of what we knew, using our own words and our own images.

Comme un aimant arrived at a time when La Haine, Ma 6-T va crack-er and other films were beginning to establish what would come to be called banlieue or neighbourhood cinema. Since then, there have been a huge number of such films. Does that mean this kind of cinema is genuinely more accepted today, or has the industry simply learned to incorporate these settings as long as it is told certain very specific stories? Has the perspective genuinely broadened, or have we simply created a new genre with its own clichés?

I think there has obviously been an evolution. There are many more films coming out of these places, many more characters, directors and actors who have been able to enter the film industry.

But being more represented doesn’t necessarily mean being more free.

Once a certain kind of film works, the industry can also learn to reproduce a formula. And then you can very quickly go from “we’re broadening the perspective” to “we now know what we expect from these neighbourhoods.”

That’s where the problem shifts.

When we made Comme un aimant, we didn’t ask ourselves whether we were making a “neighbourhood film.” We were making a film. With a story, characters, human relationships. The neighbourhood was part of their lives, but it wasn’t their entire identity.

Today, there’s sometimes a risk that the territory itself almost becomes a genre, with its own codes, expected characters and obligatory issues.

So yes, the perspective has broadened in some respects. But the real question for me is: are these characters and these directors allowed to tell stories other than the ones people expect from them?

Because freedom isn’t just about finally being visible. It’s also about being allowed to surprise people.

The Sequel to Comme un aimant

You’re currently working on a sequel to Comme un aimant, almost thirty years after the first film. What is left to tell about these characters, and above all about Marseille, after so many years? Is your approach more about showing what has changed profoundly or, on the contrary, everything that has barely changed at all?

That’s exactly it: what interests me is time.

Almost thirty years later, I can’t remake Comme un aimant. The characters have grown older, I’ve grown older, Marseille has changed, the world has changed. So the question isn’t about finding the characters exactly as they were in 2000.

What interests me is seeing what thirty years of life have done to them.

And Marseille is a bit like another character. So many things have changed: the neighbourhoods, social relations, the city itself, which has been transformed and has also become much more gentrified. But some things remain. Class relations, certain forms of solidarity, certain kinds of violence, certain ways of getting by, of coming together.

So I’m not trying to make a nostalgic film, nor am I trying to say, “Things were better before.” That would be too easy.

I’d rather confront two eras. What we have become, what the city has become, and what, despite everything, continues to connect us to the place we come from.

And there’s something very personal in that too: when you look at a city thirty years later, you’re inevitably looking at your own life as well.

And are you considering producing the film independently once again?

Yes, it’s something I’m seriously considering.

I’ve already made films under circumstances where we had to find solutions outside the traditional system, and today I understand the constraints of filmmaking much better.

But being independent doesn’t necessarily mean doing everything alone. What I’m mainly trying to preserve is freedom over the film, its writing, its tone and the way Marseille will be filmed.

That said, if a producer or distributor wants to support the project without trying to force it into a formula, then obviously I’m open to that. I’m not opposed to the system on principle.

I simply don’t want to wait for someone to give me permission to make the film.

I want to start building it and then see who wants to get on board.

The Series Project with Akhenaton

You also co-wrote a series project with Akhenaton about Marseille in the 1980s. What did you want to tell through that series?

With Akhenaton, we wanted to tell the story of Marseille in the 1980s, but not simply through nostalgia for the eighties.

It was an era we had actually lived through. The beginnings of hip-hop, the music, the neighbourhoods, the transformations of Marseille, the relationships between the different communities… It was also about a generation of young people trying to find their place and inventing their own codes.

Above all, we wanted to tell the story of that period from the inside, before it became an image or a narrative that had already been written.

The project was being developed with Canal+. At the time, there were several proposals centred around hip-hop culture. One of them in particular was already fairly advanced. And Canal+ basically explained to us that they weren’t going to develop several hip-hop-related projects at the same time.

Our project had its own universe and its own story: it wasn’t the same subject. But from a programming perspective, they didn’t want two projects that could be perceived as belonging to the same cultural territory.

That’s how the project came to an end.

What’s slightly paradoxical is that you can have a completely different story to tell and still end up being identified through a handful of keywords: Marseille, the eighties, hip-hop… And sometimes those few words are enough to put two projects in the same box.

Is there sometimes a paradox between platforms saying they are looking for different voices and the fact that they nevertheless expect those voices to tell certain stories in a certain way?

Yes, absolutely.

They tell you: “We’re looking for new voices and stories we’ve never seen before.” But when you come in with something different, very quickly you’re asked to fit into the box that corresponds to your identity.

I’m from Marseille, I made Comme un aimant, I worked with IAM. So obviously, in some people’s minds, I’m the guy who is supposed to tell stories about Marseille, the neighbourhoods and hip-hop.

That’s the paradox: people want different voices, as long as those voices tell the stories expected of them.

For me, real freedom isn’t just about giving new voices a platform. It’s about allowing them to surprise you.

Rapsodie: Hip-Hop as a Total Art Form

With Rapsodie, you went somewhere else again: a film, a fourteen-track album and a musical show. Hip-hop itself was born from the combination of several disciplines — music, dance, DJing, graffiti and performance. Was Rapsodie, in a way, an attempt to bring all those dimensions back to life within a single work?

Yes, absolutely. But I didn’t set out thinking, “I’m going to reconstruct the five disciplines of hip-hop.” That would have been too theoretical.

What interested me was recovering something of hip-hop’s original spirit: that ability to mix disciplines, to move from sound to image, from dance to writing, from DJing to performance.

With Rapsodie, I wanted everything to interact. The film wasn’t simply a film with a soundtrack. The album wasn’t simply an album accompanying the film. And the stage show wasn’t originally an adaptation of the film, but a continuation of it.

All three existed together, and each had a life of its own.

Ultimately, maybe that’s what I’ve always loved about hip-hop: you start with very little, you take whatever is around you, you mix different forms together and you invent your own language.

Rapsodie was also a way of rediscovering that freedom.

Today we see works such as La Haine moving from cinema to the stage, combining rap, dance, theatre and video. We also have filmmakers such as Romain Gavras working with highly choreographed and musical forms. Isn’t this blending of disciplines ultimately the fullest expression of hip-hop culture — a culture that, by definition, has never wanted to remain confined to a single form?

Yes, I think that’s exactly it.

From the very beginning, hip-hop never really respected the boundaries between disciplines. A DJ, a dancer, a graffiti artist, an MC: each had their own language, but everything interacted. It was a culture of mixing things together, repurposing them and inventing something new.

So when we see rap entering theatre today, dance entering cinema, video becoming an integral part of a stage production, I don’t see that as a break with hip-hop. It’s almost its natural logic.

And that’s also why I’m a little wary of boxes. As soon as a new form appears, people try to give it a genre, a category, a market.

Whereas hip-hop, at its core, is precisely about asking: “Why choose?”

You can be a musician, a dancer, a filmmaker, a graphic designer, a performer… and move from one language to another.

That’s the kind of freedom that still interests me today.

Plan B: The Price of Independence

With Plan B, you also discovered just how difficult it can be to make a film when you want to preserve your independence. At what point did you realise that the problem was perhaps no longer simply having something to say, but getting the right — and the means — to say it?

With Plan B, I realised something pretty brutal: having a story to tell isn’t enough.

The problem is no longer purely artistic. The moment your subject makes people a little uncomfortable, when you want to look at the city differently, when you don’t easily fit into a box, you also have to find someone willing to finance that voice.

And that’s when you discover that cinema is also an industry. There are producers, broadcasters, distributors, funding bodies… and each of them has their own expectations.

Plan B taught me that independence comes at a price. You can have the desire, the ideas, sometimes even the footage… but if you don’t have the means to produce and distribute it, your film can end up sitting in a drawer.

But paradoxically, that’s also what made me more independent.

I realised that I couldn’t keep waiting indefinitely for someone to give me the means to make the films I wanted to make.

At some point, either you accept that you’re not going to make the film, or you find another way to make it.

The word “independent” gets used a lot, particularly in rap, as though it were necessarily something glorious. But in your career, independence has also come at a very real price. Do you feel that you have paid a professional price for your choices, for refusing to fit into certain boxes, or for your political positions?

Yes. And looking back, I think I’ve sometimes paid quite a high price for it.

There are films I wasn’t able to make, projects that came to an end, moments when I realised that certain doors simply weren’t going to open for me. And inevitably, after a while, you start wondering whether you might have had an easier career if you’d done things differently.

But I know myself. I know that if I’d started calculating every word I said, every decision I made, according to what it might bring me professionally, I probably wouldn’t be the same filmmaker anymore.

My independence has never been a posture. It comes from my journey. I started making images with whatever means I had, I worked with people I believed in, I told stories about things that mattered to me. And I never really learned how to do it any other way.

Of course my positions, my refusal to fit into certain boxes, may have closed doors for me.

But what costs me the most isn’t necessarily a door closing. Sometimes it’s seeing a project I believe in fail to make it to the finish line for reasons that have nothing to do with the film itself.

That said, I’m not going to complain. I’ve also been incredibly lucky, I’ve met some wonderful people, and I’ve been able to make films I might never have imagined making.

But yes, I’ve paid the price for my freedom. And I’d rather have paid that price than spent my life trying to please people.

Why Write After Spending Your Life Filming?

Because after spending my life filming other people, at some point I needed to film differently: with words.

For years, I told stories about characters, cities, people, situations. But there were also many things I had never really talked about regarding that journey, what I had experienced in the film industry, the encounters, the disappointments, the contradictions.

Writing allowed me to take my time. A camera captures something, but it can’t always explain what happened around the image.

And I think that as you get older, you look at your own journey differently. I didn’t want to write my memoirs or simply tell the story of my life. I wanted to understand certain things and, above all, put words to things that for a long time I had only filmed.

Ultimately, I haven’t stopped making cinema.

I’ve simply changed cameras.

You’ve spent decades telling stories with a camera, often without choosing the safest subjects. Why, at this particular point in your life, did you feel the need to turn to a book? What does writing allow you to say that you couldn’t — or could no longer — say through images?

I think I needed to take stock of my journey, but not only that.

The book starts from my experience, my films, what I’ve lived through in the film industry. But through that, I also wanted to talk about a system.

Because over the years, I discovered an industry that often presents itself as progressive, open, attentive to differences… but which can also reproduce very deep social inequalities. Exclusion too.

And I wanted to say that.

Not simply to say, “This is what happened to me,” but to try to understand why some people have easier access to certain places, certain networks, certain careers, while others remain outside the door.

Writing allowed me to take that step back. To connect my own journey to something broader: social background, representation, power relations, the labels people put on you.

And above all, I wanted to be able to say it without creating a character, without going through fiction.

The camera allowed me to tell stories. The book allowed me to tell what those stories had taught me about the industry in which I made them.

Your book also talks about the film industry from the inside — its silences, its power dynamics and its pretences. Does French cinema genuinely accept filmmakers from working-class neighbourhoods today, or does it mainly accept certain stories it expects them to tell?

I think we have to be honest: cinema is also a business.

And today, for certain people from working-class neighbourhoods, you can clearly see that the industry looks for people who already have an audience: stand-up comedians, one-man-show performers, YouTubers with several million views, people who have already built an audience.

They’re first expected to prove themselves somewhere else, to build a community, to generate an audience. And then cinema starts taking an interest in them.

But the question I ask myself is: are people primarily interested in their talent as filmmakers, or in the value of the audience they can bring with them?

Because that reasoning isn’t necessarily applied in the same way to every writer-director — particularly those from bourgeois backgrounds.

And that’s where I’m talking about a much subtler form of inequality. It can look as though the doors are open, when in reality some people have to arrive with their own audience, their own media capital, almost their own market and almost a guarantee of commercial success.

For me, that raises a real question: do we discover an author because they have something to say, or because they already represent an attractive audience?

Once the second criterion becomes decisive, we’re no longer really operating according to an artistic logic. We’re operating according to market logic.

And I think that’s one of the contradictions of a film industry that presents itself as progressive: it can diversify the faces we see while preserving the same economic mechanisms.

In other words, are you given a voice only on the condition that you speak the language the industry has already written for you?

Yes, that’s exactly the problem.

Sometimes, you’re not really being asked to speak. You’re being asked to confirm the narrative that has already been constructed about you.

You come from a working-class neighbourhood: they expect a neighbourhood story. You come from hip-hop: they expect hip-hop. You have a community behind you: they look at how many people you can bring with you.

And if you come in with something else, with a story that doesn’t fit that image, suddenly your background becomes less interesting to them.

That’s what I mean when I talk about exclusion in the book. It isn’t always overt. Nobody necessarily tells you, “You don’t belong here.” They can simply refuse to finance your project, fail to understand it, or not know where to place it.

The problem is that the film industry can open the door for you while having already written the role you’re supposed to play once you’re inside.

Netflix, Amazon and the Illusion of Choice

Twenty or thirty years ago, a handful of producers, broadcasters and distributors held an enormous amount of power. Today, we have Netflix, Amazon Prime and theoretically many more ways of financing and distributing a work. Is it genuinely easier today to make a different kind of film exist, or have we simply multiplied the pipelines while continuing to pump the same old stuff through them?

No, I wouldn’t say things were better before. That would be absurd.

There are far more possibilities today than when I started. Netflix, Amazon, platforms, broadcasters, digital technology… There are more ways to produce, more ways to show a film, and that has inevitably opened doors.

But that doesn’t mean everything has suddenly become easy.

Power has simply changed form. Before, you might have had a handful of people who concentrated an enormous amount of power. Today, there are more of them, but each also has their own criteria: audience, market, subscriptions, visibility.

So I’m not saying “things were better before” or “everything is locked down today.”

I’m simply observing that the number of pipelines has increased, but the question remains the same: who decides what deserves to be produced and shown?

And that hasn’t completely changed.

Obviously, I’d rather have ten possibilities today than just one. It would be ridiculous to complain about that.

Marseille: The Real City vs. the Marseille Brand

Marseille has become incredibly culturally desirable. People come here, move here, and film it constantly. Yet the dominant representations often oscillate between OM, sunshine, folklore and the romantic gangster. Does the real city sometimes disappear behind the “Marseille” brand?

Yes, absolutely.

Marseille has become a brand. It’s quite striking when you knew the city before it became so desirable.

Today, Marseille is everywhere: in series, films, advertising, tourism, music videos. And obviously, it’s a good thing that the city attracts so much interest. But by being represented so much, it can also be reduced to a few instantly recognisable signs: the sunshine, the sea, OM, the Old Port, the working-class neighbourhoods, the gangster…

Sometimes, you’re no longer really filming Marseille. You’re filming the idea people have of Marseille.

What has always interested me is the city as it is actually lived. The people who live there, the contradictions, the transformations, the places that disappear, the ones that emerge, the people who stay.

Because Marseille isn’t a postcard, but nor is it simply a city of violence and hustling.

And there’s something that really strikes me today: people who come to film Marseille can sometimes be fascinated by a city they’re discovering, while those who live there also see everything that is disappearing.

Are we still capable of seeing the city behind the brand?

Between parts of the city centre undergoing intense gentrification and neighbourhoods where social divisions remain extremely deep, aren’t we gradually creating two Marseilles that interact with each other less and less?

Yes, and it’s something I feel quite strongly because I knew Marseille before, and I’m still watching it today.

The city has changed enormously. Some central neighbourhoods have become highly sought-after, prices have risen, new populations have arrived. At the same time, in some working-class neighbourhoods, social difficulties are still there, sometimes very intensely.

The problem isn’t that different kinds of people live in the same city. Marseille has always been a city of mixing.

What worries me more is when these worlds stop meeting each other.

You can live in Marseille, work in Marseille, go out in Marseille, and ultimately never visit certain neighbourhoods, never meet certain communities, never know their reality.

At that point, it’s no longer simply a difference in living standards. It’s a difference in the experience of the same city.

And that’s also why I’ve been filming Marseille for so long. Because the city changes, but I want to preserve a trace of what still exists behind those transformations.

There’s nothing wrong with a city changing. But when its residents are no longer living in the same city at all, then something else is happening.

And can such long-lasting territorial segregation really continue indefinitely without eventually producing some form of social explosion?

Yes, and I don’t think you can understand Marseille today without looking at how the city has changed since the 1990s.

The divide already existed. I experienced it. But from 1995 onwards, with the major regeneration projects and Euroméditerranée in particular, planning decisions were made that profoundly transformed certain parts of the city. Officially, the project was intended to transform the northern waterfront and reconnect the city centre with the port.

While massive investment was going into certain areas, working-class neighbourhoods much further north continued to accumulate difficulties.

It’s not only about what we built, but also what we didn’t build, what we didn’t repair, and all the places that were left behind.

When you look at the result thirty years later, you can clearly see that the city hasn’t been transformed in the same way everywhere.

INSEE has also found that spatial disparities remain very significant and that, in several former industrial neighbourhoods, the situation is changing far less than in the central areas affected by regeneration programmes.

So yes, for me, we have gradually created two Marseilles: one Marseille that is renovated, promoted and made attractive, and another that remains stuck with the same social problems, the same deteriorating housing, the same difficulties with transport and access to facilities, particularly cultural ones.

When you’ve lived in that second Marseille for a long time, inevitably you end up asking yourself: “Is this transformation of the city meant for me too, or is it simply happening next to me?”

Maybe that’s the real problem.

And when you experience that for a generation, it’s no longer simply a difference in income. It’s the feeling that you’re not participating in the same future.

I don’t know when or how a social explosion might happen. But I think we make a mistake when we imagine that a divide this deep can remain indefinitely without consequences.

Marseille is an unequal city. When part of its population starts to feel that their city is being transformed without them, frustration and anger can eventually find ways of expressing themselves.

And what’s striking in Marseille is that all of this is now visible in the landscape.

You can postpone the problem, move it somewhere else, renovate around it… but you can’t transform a city indefinitely while leaving part of its population feeling that it no longer belongs to them.

What Remains of IAM’s Marseille?

Recently, I happened to mention the Wu-Tang Clan to some very young rappers and realised they didn’t really know who they were. It made me feel old, obviously, but more importantly it made me think about transmission. So what remains today, among young Marseille artists, of the hip-hop culture of IAM’s era?

I think a huge amount remains, just not necessarily in the same form.

IAM’s Marseille left behind something very powerful: the idea that you could come from here, speak with your accent, have your own references, tell the story of your city and reach the whole of France. Today, when you look at the Marseille scene, it’s still incredibly vibrant, with very different generations and styles.

But the hip-hop culture of that era was broader than rap. There was DJing, breaking, graffiti, rap, the love of sampling, cinema, American culture… All of that formed a whole. Today, many young people talk more about rap than hip-hop in the broader cultural sense. That isn’t necessarily a problem; it’s simply a different era.

And there’s another thing that has changed: in our time, you almost had to know the history in order to move forward. We went looking for records, images, films, references. Today, everything is immediately available. That’s an extraordinary opportunity, but it can also make you lose that feeling of searching for something.

So when a young rapper doesn’t know Wu-Tang, I’m not going to tell him, “You don’t know anything.” There were things I didn’t know at his age either.

A culture doesn’t survive simply because people talk about it. It survives when someone takes hold of it, transforms it and makes something new out of it.

Ultimately, maybe that’s what remains most strongly from IAM’s Marseille: not a formula, not a style to reproduce, but the freedom to take whatever is around you and turn it into your own language.

And that ultimately raises another question: what remains today of the Marseille you portrayed with IAM and Comme un aimant? Has the city fundamentally changed, or do the same divisions essentially remain beneath the new façades and the more attractive image it projects?

Yes, Marseille has changed profoundly. I can see it immediately because I knew the city before all of this.

When I go back today to some of the places where I grew up, where I filmed, where I hung out, sometimes I barely recognise anything. The façades have changed, the neighbourhoods have changed, the people have changed too. Marseille has become much more attractive, much more closely watched. And in some respects, that’s a good thing.

But when you know what lies behind the façade, you also see what hasn’t changed.

The differences between neighbourhoods, the social inequalities, certain communities that remain excluded from the city’s development… I still see all of that.

And maybe that’s what strikes me most: Marseille’s image has changed enormously, but not necessarily at the same pace for all of its residents.

I knew a working-class Marseille that wasn’t perfect, far from it, but where people felt that the city belonged to them. Today, there are places where I sometimes ask myself: who is this new Marseille actually for?

That’s also why I don’t want to look at this city nostalgically. I don’t want to say things were better before. I want to look at what actually happened.

Behind the new façades, the restaurants, the tourists, the new residents and this much more appealing image of Marseille, there are still the people who have lived there for a long time.

Ultimately, maybe that’s what interests me today: what have we done with the city we grew up in, and who has it become so attractive for?

Je viens gâcher la fête

Your book is called Je viens gâcher la fête. So I’ll end in the simplest possible way: what is this “party”? And above all, whose party are you here to fuck up?

The party is an industry that loves talking about freedom, diversity, equality, progress… and yet can continue reproducing mechanisms of exclusion and inequalities that have existed for a very long time.

And after twenty-five years in that industry, I reached a point where I wanted to say: stop. Let’s also look at what’s happening behind the rhetoric.

I’m here to spoil the party because I don’t want to pretend anymore. Because I’ve known the film sets, the successes, the failures, the doors that open and the doors that close. And I’ve seen talented people remain outside, not necessarily because they lacked talent, but because they didn’t have the right codes, the right networks, the right social or economic capital, the right skin colour.

So yes, the book is political. There’s anger in it. But it isn’t anger for anger’s sake. It’s anger that comes from experience and tries to understand.

I’m here to piss off the people who want us to keep pretending that cinema is naturally an open, meritocratic and progressive world, without looking at the mechanisms that continue to produce exclusion.

It’s not Je viens gâcher la fête because I don’t like cinema. I’m here to spoil the party because I love cinema too much to accept that we refuse to look at what happens behind the scenes.

And if that makes people uncomfortable, good. A party where some people are inside while others are left standing at the door isn’t really a party.