Hassan Guerrar has a sense of staging. The interview he gives on a rainy September morning in Paris is a vivid example of this. He directs from a distance, as if it were a sequence shot, the short distance that separates the Barbès-Rochechouart metro station from the meeting place. From the intersection of Barbès and de la Chapelle boulevards, where his film premieres, we pass in front of the staircase where Malek, his main character (played by Sofiane Zermani), meets the young people of the neighborhood. Then there is the butcher shop where he buys a powdered chorba substitute shortly afterwards, the tobacco shop in another setting, the Algerian fast food restaurant where a protagonist goes to eat skewers…
These few blocks, these blocks of buildings are your setting. An intimate map stuck in your heart. There he appears, chatting on the terrace with his “friends” of which he made characters. Every ten minutes, he calls out to a passerby in Arabic and then adds as an aside: “I had five days of filming! »
Hassan Guerrar, 57, has just filmed his first feature film, Barbès, little Algeria. A supposed self-portrait – although “fictional”, he insists. His hero, Malek, is in his thirties and has a family left behind. “bleeding” with whom you disagree. He has triumphed in life but, when the Covid-19 pandemic arrives, he finds himself confined outdoors with his ghosts and his origins in this district in the north of Paris, a mecca of North African immigration. An intimate chronicle of a warm and violent microcosm, where French is spoken mixed with Arabic words (or the opposite), the film says a lot about its creator: a pure deserter, as they say today.
Bledard of the seventh art, Barbésien, who knows by heart the films of Patrice Chéreau and André Téchiné, this figure of French cinema, who has worked in the shadows for forty years, trembles today for having exposed himself like this, all while displaying his ambition bravado of finally being seen, recognized. ” Love “, he said simply.
Cajole artists
Press officer for dozens of notable films (The Life of Adèle, Portrait of the Girl on Fire, Mammuth, The Event, Divines, Camille Redoubles, Les Beaux Gosses, Shéhérazade, La Petite Lili, A Very Discreet Hero…) and dozens of rightly forgotten feature films, Hassan Guerrar has been the watchdog watching over some of the biggest names in auteur cinema for years. Abdellatif Kechiche, Céline Sciamma, Thierry de Peretti and Audrey Diwan have been loyal to him since his inception.
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