Pascale Bodet: As I told Christiane, my English is bad when I speak, so I’m afraid my spoken English sounds like all Greek or double Dutch or German yoghurt to you. Please accept my apologies for this.
Barbara Wurm: Speaking of languages I think you are an expert in this matter because you just made a film about it with your friend Amr. Can you tell us when you decided that this friendship and this person would be the main character in your film?
PB: Yes. I happen to know him in my neighbourhood, because as you may recognise through the window, the set of the movie is the street where I live. Today, there is an urban farm. But before, in 2015, 2016, there were camps and many immigrants living there. Now, they have moved a little further, closer to the metro. At that time, Amr was running what he called his ‘point chaud’, his little bakery, where you could have a cup of coffee or croissants, while I sometimes helped an organisation which gave out breakfast to the immigrants. Among the volunteers, there was a man from my street. We knew each other through these breakfasts, and he asked me to help Amr get his papers by writing a letter for his application file. Then I happened to know Amr, since I wrote the letter and had coffee at his point chaud. In 2019, I asked him to help me with a strange language speaking character in my fiction ‘Vas-tu renoncer ?’ (‘Edouard and Charles’), and he accepted to be the model for my character Gulcan. And one day, he asked me to help him with his integration process, to get his permit to stay in France. So, in 2020 and at the beginning of 2021, we went together to migrant aid associations. And in September 2021, he asked me to help him get in contact with a lawyer and to be with him during the appointment. So I told him, ‘Well, OK, but may I begin to shoot a movie?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ Months later, when Amr finally had his papers, he didn’t want to be shot for the movie anymore. According to him, the film was finished, but it wasn’t finished from my point of view. You talk about ‘friendship’. But if I may, Amr is not a friend, he is a neighbour, and being neighbours in this case involved proximity and solidarity. The movie is a neighbourhood movie, dealing with proximity and solidarity, but also dealing with being strangers to one another, since we are neighbours but not friends.
BW: At the moment you decided that you want to ask him to make the film, do you remember any specific reason that made sure that this would be a film? Is it the complexity of the migration situation or was it the specific case, or the person, or your role in it?
PB: It was the specific case of Amr. What I adored in Amr were his gestures, his vitality, and his looks, and that he is very joyful while being in the terrible situation of the immigrant. So this contradiction attracted me at first. The second thing that struck me was his way of speaking. His language sounded to me as comical as it did pathetic. Since I’m interested in documentary comedies – or in comical aspects in documentaries – I thought Amr would be a good character. And the fact that we could not talk easily to each other, and that he wouldn’t analyse from an abstract point of view whereas I am a lot into that. I thought this antagonism would be interesting and even comical. The third thing is that when the film started, there was the promise of action to come, because at that time we were entering an administrative process following a calendar, with suspense, episodes, accidents. And I remember that he said several times ‘Action, action – action movie!’ – this is not in the movie, but I think his references are action movies. Action here is a paradox, since Amr’s situation was changing so very little and with so many difficulties. Anyway, these three contradictory and antagonistic and paradoxical materials appeared to me as good documentary stuff.
Christiane Büchner: When the film starts, we feel that you know each other. It’s clear that the film is starting here, not the story. And one of the first things you ask him is ‘why are you dressed so well?’ Why did you ask him that?
PB: And he answers that he’s always dressed like this. Then we both conclude that it’s a camouflage to not attract the police. It’s also one of the main reasons why I picked him as a character, not only because of his gestures and his situation and his language, but also because of how he dresses – he doesn’t look like other immigrants that I see in my street. I wouldn’t say that there is an immigrant ‘look’. There are plenty of immigrants and there are plenty of looks, but Amr is a good-looking and well-dressed man, and that, combined with gestures, situation, and language, goes against the cliché.
We are equals because he cannot understand what I’m saying and I cannot understand what he is saying.
BW: On the one hand, what is interesting is that it’s against the cliché. He goes against the cliché. And on the other hand, you said you were interested about the antagonism of your approaches. So the third question would be about the hierarchy over the discourse. Did you think about it as a challenge and as a problem for your film? And how did you answer this challenge? Or did you not think about it?
PB: Do you mean trapped in this hierarchy? Because I could have taken the lead in the relationship?
BW: Yes, especially because of the language, because the topic of your film. The whole existential problem is knowing the language. And so you have to find certain ways of talking with him that keep you from being the bearer of the knowledge, with him unaware all the time.
PB: That’s what I find interesting. I know how to speak to the lawyer. I manage to answer the administrative questions better than him. But within our relationship we are equals because he cannot understand what I’m saying and I cannot understand what he is saying. And that’s what I also wanted the viewer to experience: to be in the position not to understand, and how to relate to somebody within these difficulties. The hierarchy is weakened in such a position and situation. I guess you saw the film with subtitles? But it’s a quite different experience when you have the raw French or non-French, the approximative language in the original version without subs. It’s more painful to stay with the movie not understanding Amr, watching me not understanding him. Painful, but also comical – because in this movie pain and the comical are linked.
What’s important is what consequences it has on Amr in terms of affect, joy, sadness, depression, discouragement, hope. Sometimes these feelings don’t fit in with the legal acts, the objectivity of the process.
CB: I would like to add something. I’ve seen your film three times, and I still don’t understand what the receipt is that he gets. This is also the administrative language coming in. I perceive that Amr is difficult to understand, but the whole process is also very difficult to understand. So it’s a complete Babel.
PB: Yes, Babel is nice, especially when he has his receipt – which is just a document that certifies that the administration has got his file. Just because of this receipt, him and Karim, the pastry man, are so happy in the one scene that I ask: ‘But this is just a receipt? It’s not the permit to live in France!’ It makes it even more difficult for the viewer because it’s just a receipt Amr should have received two months earlier – so why is he so happy? The administrative process is full of complications and the legal matter is technical and complicated, but we tried to be as precise as possible so that the movie has its own chronology in terms of facts and technical steps. The movie leans on these facts. Amr confronts and runs into them step by step. I can understand that it is difficult for a viewer to understand the particularities of the French legal system, even after watching the film three times – the system is hard to understand, whether you are Amr or anybody else, not only because it’s law, but also because since it’s political, there is a bit of nonsense in it, as the lawyer in the movie says. The movie is not a pedagogical manual or an instruction book, but its facticity was a key point since Amr depended on these facts and the legal process he runs into, having no hold on them while they govern his life. What’s important is what consequences the process has on Amr in terms of affect, joy, sadness, depression, discouragement, hope. Sometimes these feelings don’t fit in with the legal acts, the objectivity of the process.
CB: Yes, I can feel for Amr... I mean, when he gets his permit and for him, it’s done, even if it’s only a temporary one.
PB: Yes. That’s why I thought it was necessary not to stop filming at that point. There is this victory of having at last his papers after 17 years of residency in France, but I wanted to shoot what came next – ups and downs, with many downs, and sadness and passivity. It’s Amr’s personality not to catch up with changes, but I guess it’s quite impossible to start up again after 17 year’s of survival, so the situation he went through is probably very responsible for this feeling of unchanging he conveys. I think it’s too difficult to live in this country. When you have 17 years of precarity, fighting for your life and survival, you are tired, even if you finally have your permit, it doesn’t solve everything, as suggested in other sequences. But that’s what I love about Amr. He can burst out of joy, even if nothing is going well.
CB: Obviously, people like him a lot. Not only you, other people, too.
PB: Yes, he’s very social. He speaks to plenty of people.
CB: And in the end, in this scene in the language course, you realise what the people who learn French learn about their future. I’m versatile. I’m a cleaning operator. I have a business plan. So there is once more language on top of everything else.
PB: Yes. This is what these lessons are made of. The girl who gives the lessons, she’s from Algeria. She studied in France and she was very nicely involved, the students liked her a lot. But this is the program the state decides that the students should be taught, very pragmatic things as you say… Future, future, what you will become, what you will do. I was interested in filming this because you realise then how difficult it is to learn a language, and that Amr is one among others, an anonymous person within a collective at the end of the movie. And the course is a micro-society – that’s why, at that point, I’m not in the movie anymore.
CB: Can you tell us something about other interventions in your film? To bring other people, like Naima, into the scenes. What were your strategies to bring new aspects into the film?
PB: In this case, I was filming in my street, so I know the neighbourhood quite well. And the way I work is: I film a sequence, then I watch the footage and I say, ‘Well, there are A, B, C, D… plenty of possibilities and I want to draw a thread from what I have shot to one or the other.’ That’s the way I go from one shoot to another. For instance, I knew that I wanted to include the garden with the animals, but I didn’t do this at the beginning. Before going to the garden, I had this idea about the paradox of the egg and the chicken. In the case of Naïma, it was similar. She was working for a theatre organisation and at one time she tried to involve Amr in theatre as another way to learn French, but he went just once or twice. When Amr had gotten his receipt and had to wait for his papers, I thought that it was time for him and for the movie (!) that he should learn French through the theatre Naïma got him into. But he resisted and didn’t want to get involved in theatre or learn French. So I asked Naïma to come to Karim’s bakery and let her give Amr a lesson. That was one of my strategies. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Many of those scenes about learning French were cut out because I was beginning to overwhelm Amr with my language learning obsession. The only character I didn’t ask about filming is Mokhtar, the Arabic speaking friend of Amr. It was Amr who made an appointment with Mokhtar to come to Karim when he knew that we would be shooting. Why are you laughing?
It’s really part of the viewer’s experience to live through this non-understandable relationship of understanding, a thriving relationship in terms of verbal language.
BW: (laughing) He surprised you.
PB: Yes, because I had to say, ‘Well, Mokhtar, nice to meet you. Can we shoot you? Can we clip a microphone on you?’ Well, it’s the work of the Free Cinema documentarist to react to any situation and try to do the best they can. So Mokhtar is in the movie, and it was a choice not to subtitle the Arabic because I couldn’t understand a word of it. And I absolutely didn’t want and never will want Amr’s dialogue to be subtitled. It’s really part of the viewer’s experience to live through this non-understandable relationship of understanding, a thriving relationship in terms of verbal language.
CB: But you managed, even in the English subtitles, to keep some of this experience and I follow you understanding him. It’s wonderful how you two managed to get to a basic understanding.
PB: Yes. First, it was my role to smoothen the relationship, because when I understood things or when I knew things and thought I could clear the situation for the viewer in terms of the legal process, I did it very clearly in French. But then there is this process of editing, which was very heavy because I wanted the viewer to be in the position of not understanding. But I had to weigh and balance between something that is tolerable in terms of understanding, and something that is not tolerable. Do you understand? It’s a question of balancing, where you can take the viewer without losing him or her. But I do think the subtitled version is easier to watch because each viewer has a tendency to read before watching (like with comic books).
CB: How did you work with the music?
PB: Ah, the music! Well, it was my idea to have punk music, because I knew that sometimes it would relieve viewers from the feeling of being lost in translation. I wanted to allow them not to listen anymore to any words, not to try to understand anymore. I knew I wanted scenes with very loud music that drowns out the words. In the beginning, I thought I would create this effect of lyricism and relief more systematically. But working very strictly in the editing, I realised that it was possible to balance the repetitions of the misunderstandings. In the end, there is only one big moment with very loud music. In other scenes it’s just a little dose, a small piece of music just to provide some relief and make the viewer feel that what we are discussing is just a repetition. The musician is by an old Belgian punk. I thought he would be the right person to ask, because he has this inadaptiveness towards the daily requests from the state.
BW: It’s very good that we have a film in the programme that is looking for modes of representing the inadaptiveness of the fucking world. I want to come back to the relationship between you and Amr. Did you tell him why you were filming certain things the way you do or did you keep the profession distant from the on-camera relationship?
PB: I tried to involve him and make him interested in the process because I wanted to make sure that he understood what we were doing. But he had a tendency to change subjects and he did so as soon as I would talk to him about the movie. During the shoots, I thought he would ask me things about my work, but he did not. But it’s not the first time because in my previous documentaries, my characters also didn’t know much or even anything about filmmaking or cinema. Maybe they did not care, or maybe they were too shy to ask, I don’t know. So I just made sure that we had an appointment and that he would be there. He liked my two technicians, David and Fred, image and sound. It was friendly and he liked them very much.
It’s obvious that I’m not from his social background, and I’m a caricature because I fit in the exact sociology of the people who help immigrants.
BW: Since I don’t know your other films, are you always part of your films or do you know when to be part of it and when not?
PB: As a matter of fact, I’m part of my documentaries a lot, except for one. This only one was with and about a friend of mine and how he disliked his job, and I didn’t want to explore this being friends in a movie between friends, because friendship was not the subject and I didn’t want to make it nicey-nicey in the movie. I am a part of all the other films, but mostly through the sound. For this film, I decided that I would appear visually, like an actress, body and voice. I wanted this because usually people who help in these situations are women over 50 and from the upper middle class. I didn’t want to hide that. For me, it was important that the viewer could locate who I am, how I look, and I was very conscious of how I was dressed – always in black, with some fantasy but strict garments, and a little makeup, but not too much. Just to be Parisian, a little bobo. I found it interesting that the social difference could be seen. It’s obvious that I’m not from his social background, and I’m a caricature because I fit in the exact sociology of the people who help immigrants. Then in the garden scene with the animals, when I ask him about his love life, it was conscious too that I wanted us to be together, not as a real couple, but as an image of a couple that could have existed in another world, a world in which integration would be facilitated, made possible and have succeeded. Because if the story of his non-integration were to follow another, less lonely path, it could have been like in these old photos that he shows me. Is this clear?
BW: Yeah, absolutely.
PB: I love filming myself, holding the camera, because you have an intuitive relationship to what you are filming, very physical and non-intellectual. I like that. But I also asked the cameraman David to film Amr and sometimes me so that I could appear visually.
BW: I want to wrap it up and ask one last maybe bigger question. When I wrote about your film, I meant it really as a gesture of love when I called you a film critic, a knowledgeable person of cinema (and I didn’t, by any means, intend to hide that you are a filmmaker), that it is very special still to have film critics and people who understand filmmaking from a perceptual point of view. As a very active member of the society which your film is part of, I want to ask you more about the French context, the Paris context, or even European context in terms of the big question of migration. If you were a film critic watching BEAUCOUP PARLER (A Lot Talk), how would you contextualise it with films about this topic or the current question of migration? In films, this is often cliched, and your films does not really work along those lines.
PB: May I ask a question before?
BW: Sure.
PB: Why don’t you find it clichéd?
BW: Well, because I think it’s very honest in the way it shows the complexity in a very direct way. You foreground the language so much and you don’t tell the story, but basically perform the complexity.
PB: It’s a very hard question you are asking me. Well, there are good movies. For instance, L’Histoire de Souleymane (Souleymane’s Story, 2024) by Boris Lojkine. It’s a very good fiction movie about an immigrant resisting the state imposed on him. It’s very good, but the character, the point of view, the positioning are far away from my movie. The character of Souleymane fights, lies, trusts, is betrayed, makes himself understood. It’s an action movie and I was fascinated and thrilled and contented, whereas Amr smiles, says hello to people, and waits, and I guess the viewer has to deal with misunderstanding and daily technical matters in order to be moved by Amr. I’m conscious BEAUCOUP PARLER is a neighbourhood movie, with means at hand, and it’s my position and my choice to do movies this way, filming with an iPhone. No ideology, no dreams, no myth, no nothing. Just daily reality and cinema. Daily reality with practical questions of cinema, like how to film, how to shoot. It’s not spectacular, it’s not especially the taste of these times. I’m happy you noticed how conscious the way I wanted to be visually part of the movie is. It makes me sure that you noticed my way of making movies is also a way to view society as a solidarity garden crossed by neighbours. Maybe for some people the movie is too discreet. No dramatization, no emphasis, and no way to take the hot subjects of immigration and integration too seriously. In fact BEAUCOUP PARLER is partly a comedy about these topics, so I recall this motto : A (wo-)man who is too serious is not wise.
BW: Okay. Full stop. It’s so super perfect. I’m so proud that I asked this question. And I’m so happy you answered it.
PB: Well, thank you.
