This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Privacy Overview
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
3rd Party Cookies
This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.
Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!
Director's Statement
I began with a popular fantasy, the kind of story they like to tell about in the projects, the myth of those who "made it," or in other words, those who escaped the modern slavery of a nowhere career path by starting their own businesses. And I wanted to treat it with a certain irony, in the way you can with a narrative tale.
So this is an adventure story, one where the narration is closer to that of a tale, with all the digressions, suspensions, etc. that implies, rather than an action film per se.
He is old, poor and Arab and he wants to create something big in order to regain his dignity and help his loved ones get a leg up. Even as I confined myself to concentrating and maintaining interest in this central action, which because of its euphoric and symbolic value was very important to me, paradoxically, I allowed the parentheses to freely pile up, like so many escapades justified by the simple pleasure of contemplating the events in the daily life of a family drama.
In the end, that is the dimension which interests me most. It's about getting close to these characters who are my loved ones, in order to show little things from everyday life. That's why I had to adopt a singular narrative rhythm. Generally, an ongoing action doesn't allow you to stay on one thing too long, but a real family meal or the beginnings of an emotion showing through on someone's face needs screen time to happen.
This marriage between a novelistic dimension and the accurate portrayal of the characters and their environment is crucial to me, in part because I belong to the milieu described and so I am emotionally invested in it. But more importantly, it is a reaction to the still all-too-frequently broad and schematic portraits, I wanted to show all the complexities of this Franco-Arabic family, all of them deeply involved in the opening of this family restaurant, and therefore looking to a future which does not necessarily mean the denial of their own identity.
It seemed important to me to make a frank and energetic plea for the right to be different, without falling into the trap of the blithe and approximate stigma inherent in exoticism. A fine line to walk, and an essential one, which I believe I am particularly predisposed to because of my own emotionally invested point of view.
Abdellatif Kechiche