Tea time with West front
An interview with Roland Edzard, director of West front
How did this subject come to you?
I didn’t truly choose this subject. It was more my life path that made me question the rapport that the West has with Islam. I lived in Algeria until the age of 8, in Tamanrasset, in the great Saharan south. The people of the desert maintained an intimate religious connection in every moment of their lives. The word Allah is pronounced in nearly every sentence, they pray five times a day. When you are driving and it is time for prayer, you stop on the side of the road and pray. For a believer, there is nothing urgent enough to justify not praying.
Myself, I am not a believer, nor do I come from a religious family. But when I was a child, I learned the Koran at school. My first notebooks were written in Arabic, not French. It was the 1980s. My father, a German architect, and my mother, a biology teacher, were expelled from the country in 1988 just before the student riots in October in Algiers, and the devastating civil war of the 1990s, with the Islamic Salvation Front and the Armed Islamic Group. There was a great mistrust of “the bearded ones” as they were called during the dark years. But when I returned as an adult, I had passionate discussions about the meaning of the world and the universe with my childhood friend, who had become very pious. My story with Franck and his conversion to Islam came to me in the psychic context that I had created. I met Franck at the end of an open casting session for my first feature-length film: he had incredible talent, instant and natural. An agent noticed him during the shooting of the film and he was nominated for the Cesar Award for Most Promising Actor. I was so proud of him, having discovered him and having opened the door to the world of cinema for him. But for the big evening organized for the most promising actors, he was no longer there. He told me before leaving that he wasn’t interested in all the glitter. No promising actor had ever done that before, to turn their nose up to the Cesars. I found myself alone that evening, watching the director/actor pairs mingling with celebrities. Then, the opening of the film was a bit sad and depressing, with very few theaters, even though it had been selected by about fifteen directors. I heard people from the industry who started to talk about rumors of Franck and the jihad. Even I was responsible for causing the rumor to spread.
I was worried. His mother was worried as well. I think without that worry that came from my attachment to Franck like he was a little brother I had to watch over, I would have never undertaken this film. This film is above all an internal process for me, where I question myself with a certain amount of self-deprecation at a moment where I found myself at rock bottom. In this film, I stage my delusions and my prejudices. Making this film transformed me, and Franck too. It felt liberating to do this. He also felt lighter afterwards. This film is our encounter, a friendship and a loyalty that united us despite the great ideological and cultural differences that opposed us. I think the film also represents the current approach of French society in general. Society wants to change its rapport with otherness. There is no change in becoming friends with someone who is already meant to be a friend. But becoming friends with a potential enemy is something that can pull us up, and create change towards a more complex society. The monk Brother Charles de Foucault understood this at the beginning of the 20th century when he tried in vain to convert Saharan Muslims to Christianity, and he predicted the certain failure of colonization 50 years in advance.
What part of this documentary is fiction?
There will always be a degree of fiction in reality, like there are real things in the fictional stories we tell, or like we say the truth of human history is in the hands of those who write it or who win the wars. This film tries to show the imaginary of a delusion set into motion. The video shot in Iraq is real and shot in an improvised documentary fashion. However, it becomes false and fictive once it encounters the story that Franck tells from his side. We might believe the story he is telling is false, that he is lying. How can we know? At some moment, we need to trust and believe in what we see and hear. In this film, there is a certain truth that arises from the confrontation between the two opposing versions of the story.
Did you shoot the footage in Syria yourself?
My cousin worked in Iraq. He was a former soldier in the French army who became a private security contractor. For years, he went on missions in countries at war, especially for the big oil companies, but also for the UN or the European Union in Libya, Algeria, and Yemen. When I contacted him, he had been in Iraq for two years and it was his last mission there. I didn’t have much time to think it over, so I went over without having prepared much. I didn’t know what I was going to do, or what film I was going to shoot. I just centered on the convoy, on the advancing vehicle. In my mind, I had images of Apocalypse Now with that company of soldiers that slowly goes up the river and into the darkness.
Why did you tell the story at Franck’s side instead of from the perspective of his family or friends?
The more our relationship developed, the more the “artist and his model” relationship became clear between us. When he converted to Islam, he took us all by surprise. And I had to work hard on myself to understand what was happening with Franck, outside of my jihad delusion. In the West, we didn’t understand very well what happened on 11 September 2001. We didn’t have a grasp on what was happening in the Middle East at that time: hundreds of millions of Muslims celebrated the sight of seeing the American towers fall. It wasn’t only the crazy minds of a few sectarian terrorists expressing themselves, but hundreds of thousands of people, entire countries expressing their joy to see the twin towers crumbling. We didn’t ask ourselves why there was so much animosity towards the West. Our reaction was to make them pay, there was talk of vengeance. The West immediately declared war on Iraq and Afghanistan despite the French diplomats who warned them of the historic mistake they were committing.
Are you still in contact with Franck today? Does he still live in Saint-Denis? How did he react to the film?
When I found Franck, we talked for hours. It was almost therapeutic for the both of us. We became very close. He knows my children who are half-Israeli from their mother’s side. I know his children who are half-Algerian from their mother’s side. We are in the process of writing a fiction film together. We are inspired by both his life and mine. There is richness in the fact that we come from two different worlds. In this film, we don’t talk of Islam, because that brings in too many ideological problems that create barriers for many people. Instead, we are trying to find universal themes that are dear to both of us. The film is called: Ma Vie Se Transforme En Fiction [My Life Transforms Into Fiction].
West front is being shown in National Competition F7.
