Tea time with Victor ou la piété

Interview with Mathias Gokalp, director of Victor ou la piété.

How did you come up with the idea for Victor ou la piété ?

I lived for a while in Seine-Saint Denis where I always wondered about the veiled women I passed in the street. I thought that to form an opinion, I would have to do some research and talk with them. The film consists of my questioning through that of an alter ego and stages the path of a young woman who has converted to Islam based on the accounts that I had collected. The project was also written in a period when it seemed that otherwise tolerant, open, rational people began to give in to an ambient Islamophobic rhetoric. This film is especially for them.

Islam’s place in French society today is not an easy subject to talk about because the simple choice of this subject is sometimes enough to point one’s finger and create a problem where one didn’t exist. This is why I chose to address the subject through a French family of French origin without ever showing a veil in the film.

Why did you choose the name Victor ?

Victor is a name for the victorious. Your parents give you this name so that you will conquer the world, let’s see how you do with that… His name could have been Felix or Prosper – the ironic connotation would have been the same.

Why did you choose to place your characters in an urban setting? What would it have changed if you had placed your characters in a rural setting? Why doesn’t Victor’s sister live closer to him?

At the risk of sounding simplistic, I think that the resurgence of religion is partly due to the depressing state of our world today. When you see the peri-urban zones in France, it is understandable that people may aspire to something else, and want the real world to not be this miserable mass of buildings surrounded by shopping areas and vulgar advertisements, but another world, unknown: an elsewhere.

As for Victor’s sister, this suburb is an image of her drop in class. By choosing Islam, by sharing the life of an immigrant, or a second generation immigrant, she has left her social class, willingly or despite herself, to join a less privileged sphere. Even if most of us would be willing like Victor to ignore this class barrier when it arises through an excessive commute, a blocked bus, or a train strike, our old reflexes take over and suggest to us to leave the poor in their place, or even imagine that it is their fault that they chose to live in a ghetto.

What is it about piety that interested you?

I tried to find within myself my own limits of religious tolerance, because I am fundamentally secular and atheist. When it comes to secularism, it seems to me that my country, who has historically been its champion, no longer understands it. For me, secularism is not to prevent people from living their religion, but to prevent the government from imposing its own. Today, we are experiencing the exact opposite.

As for religion, even though I may believe that science can explain most of these beliefs, I could always be mistaken, so I won’t consider those who don’t share my way of thinking as backwards or fanatical, especially as the spiritual world is part of our lives whether we want it to be or not. That’s what the film emphasizes in the story about the apartment that frightens everyone. We willingly make fun of the Chinese, whose real estate prices depend on a load of superstitions, in relation to the floor, the street number, etc. Yet, we do the same thing. Even in the absence of religion, we continue to impose additional dimensions to reality. We are metaphysical animals. If people want to believe in a god or in 6,000 gods, it’s not my place to lecture them.

Why were you interested in the brother-sister relationship?

That is exactly the problem. I just want to say: leave people be. But in a family, that’s not possible. This is the second aspect of piety, what we call filial. If Camille was simply a friend, Victor wouldn’t have questioned her choice and gone to negotiate concessions. It’s the family connection that forces him to interfere in the life of someone else. For me, the problem is not religion, it’s family.

Do you think the encounter and (re-)discovery of other people is possible in Victor ou la piété ?

Considering and admitting others is a constant effort that begins well before family or politics. Afterwards, there’s a moment where we reject certain people. It seems to me that it is possible to understand all people through a natural form of empathy, or at least through psychology, sociology, anthropology… but in fact we build our own identities by defining a limit in regards to this admission, and we are sometimes stricter with those who are closer to us..

Is changing the family model a source of anxiety? Does it come from the need to develop amidst adversity? Where can difference exist in the family unit? Do you think that flight is a better choice than demands and conflict?

For the most part, yes. Most family problems in my opinion can be resolved more simply by fleeing, but we can not always flee.

The role of the family is constantly evolving in our society. Even if, personally, I love mine very much, I tend to see this role as negative. Social inequalities come from legacy and legacy comes from family. Many models that bring down the individual are ingrained in us by family. And in periods of crisis, we are generally willing to sacrifice our ideals, our common dreams to protect the family unit. For me, family evokes a closing, a refuge, not at all generosity or openness.

Why were you interested in the theme of transmissions and of their failures or successes?

I’m struck by the movement of the pendulum that characterizes the passage from one generation to another, by rejection or a need to distinguish oneself, and at the same time by ignorance or forgetfulness. A good example are the social achievements which one generation will struggle to gain, but which their own children will neglect because they didn’t pay the price themselves.

In Camille’s case, it is quite clear that her mother’s political engagement which Victor mentions in the beginning of the film plays a part in her conversion. In my research, I often found that women who convert are often from activist environments. It’s not easy to be the child of an activist: firstly because certain parents neglect their parental responsibilities in favor of their cause, and secondly because activism breeds bitterness, a price paid by the whole family. But there sometimes remains a trace of this activism in the children, which Islam can tap into as it is a social religion.In fact, this is a trend we can observe on a large scale: in many places, Islam claimed the place left behind by the communist utopias of the 20th century.

In your opinion, is the fear of the unknown not as strong as the fear of isolation and the feeling of being “cornered” in a world we no longer want to be a part of?

I would say that the world rejects us more that we reject it. Victor worries that his sister will be marginalized because of her religion. Yet, the society in which we live creates exclusion for everyone: the youth it cannot stomach, the elderly that it abandons, the women it despises, the unemployed, immigrants, people from the countryside… The very idea of integration is a machine that creates a feeling of exclusion. I don’t see why we have to integrate seeing that society can’t exist without the sum of its excluded, which is us.

How did you write the dialogues? How did you create the duality of affection and suspicion between a brother and his sister?

It is more distance than suspicion. That tension, that difficulty to express one’s love all while admitting that life irremediably separates people really moves me. Once again, this is not autobiographical, but I worked on characters who were close to me, so it wasn’t difficult to imagine how they would react.

Do you think short film is effective in questioning the meaning of family and of “macro” social units?

I am not interested in family if it only evokes itself. As for the short film format, I can’t imagine anything it couldn’t question. The process of creation is different from the feature-length film, but a work of art can’t be judged by the space it occupies.

Victor ou la piété was either produced, co-produced or self-financed with French funds. Did you write the film with this “French” aspect in mind: in building the film’s context or in questioning certain notions?

I try my best to speak of the world in which I live and try to remain current without evoking current events. The film was written well before the attacks in January and November 2015. I think this film can be seen in the light of those events, but there is no connection with the film’s reflections, and my views have not changed.

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Victor ou la piété is being shown in National Competition F5.