Director

Samir Guesmi

France | 2020 | 80 min | French

• Producer Pascal Caucheteux
• Production Company Why Not Productions, Canal+, Cinema+
• Screenplay Samir Guesmi
• Cinematography Céline Bozon
• Editing Pauline Dairou
• Sound Nicolas Fournier, Julien Gigliotti, Julien Sicart
• Cast Samir Guesmi, Abdelrani Bendaher, Luana Bajrami, Rabah Nait-Oufella
• Contacts

  Wild Bunch

  edevos@wildbunch.eu

About the Film

Ibrahim is a teenager. His life’s reference points are his father Ahmed, who dreams to be a waiter but can only be a dishwasher because he is toothless; and his best friend Achille, a little older than him, who is a charming, good-for-nothing crook. Money is tight in the family but Ahmed has saved enough to buy dentures. In the meantime, though, Achille has convinced Ibrahim to shoplift. He gets caught and Ahmed uses the money saved for the dentures to pay for the damages. The relationship between the father and son becomes very tense and Ibrahim, crushed by his father’s contempt and his own sense of guilt, will try to do whatever it takes to regain Ahmed’s trust and give him back his hope for the future. The problem is that the only person he is close to is Achille, with his ill-advised solutions.

With this amazing first film that received the Cannes 2020 label, Guesmi delivers a meticulous etching of a father-and-son relationship and its complicated dynamics. They deeply love each other but they do not know how to voice their feelings. The director represents their relationship ‘in subtraction,’ giving the task of conveying meaning to narrative details and to intense close-ups (wonderful cinematography thanks to Céline Bozon). The young actor playing Ibrahim delivers a multilayered, touching performance that perfectly embodies the character that the director had in mind: “Ibrahim is an ‘in-betweener,’ he is French but with a mug ‘from somewhere else,’ a teenager, between childhood and adulthood, living with his father in a low-income housing area between Paris and its suburbs.”

There is much of the director’s experience in Ibrahim’s character; it gives a strong, believable sense of truth to everyday life. As the director declared, they both are French of Arab heritage, and he had a similar relationship with his father, except for the happy ending that Guesmi never had.

Teresa Cavina