The Franco-Algerian director and producer has built his latest work, which will be released on December 7 in France and will represent Algeria at the Oscars, as the third part of a generational story that looks, after Indigènes and Hors-la-Loi, on the fate of the children of immigrants
Our Brothers recounts the case of Malik Oussekine, a 22-year-old student of Algerian origin, beaten to death by police on a motorbike, on the night of December 5 to 6, 1986, while he was near La Sorbonne, where student demonstrations were taking place against a university reform project.
The film also sheds light on the tragic but much less well-known end of Abdel Benyahia, another young immigrant, killed the same night in Pantin by a drunken off-duty police inspector.
In addition to the tribute he pays to the two victims, Rachid Bouchareb carries out a work of memory. His film sounds like a salutary reminder as police violence in France against young people in the suburbs remains highly topical.
Our Brothers also criticizes, with precious documentary pieces that sound like incriminating evidence, political speech. After the death of Malik Oussekine, the Minister of the Interior at the time, Charles Pasqua, refused to condemn the police.
It is this impunity, a kind of perpetual injustice, which, according to Rachid Bouchareb, led the children of immigrants of his generation to revolt, from the beginning of the 1980s.
In the film, Malik Oussekine’s brother, brilliantly played by actor Reda Kateb, refuses to adopt a resigned posture like his father. He wants to do his counter-investigation and confuse the police.
An inspector from the IGS (General Inspectorate of the National Police) is also trying to ignore the instructions of his hierarchy to find the truth.
To write the screenplay for Nos Frangins, Rachid Bouchareb called on the Algerian novelist Kaouther Adimi.
In the main roles of the film, alongside Reda Kateb, there are also Lyna Khoudri, Raphaël Personnaz and Samir Guesmi.
The film, which will be released in cinemas in France on December 7, will be presented in Algiers by Rachid Bouchareb and his actors on December 9 and 10.
Our Brothers will also represent Algeria at the Oscars in March 2023 in the category of best international film.
Actress Lyna Khoudri, director Rachid Bouchareb and actor Reda Kateb pose during the Cannes Film Festival, on the occasion of the screening of Nos Frangins, on May 24, 2022 (AFP/Loïc Venance)
Middle East Eye: The title of your film, Our Brothers, evokes a feeling of belonging. Is it because you recognize yourself in the generation of Malik Oussekine and Abdel Benyahia, which is also yours? You were 33 when they were killed.
Rachid Bouchareb: Absolutely. Like them, I was born in France. We lived in neighborhoods close to the suburbs, in Seine-Saint-Denis.
Abdel lived in La Courneuve and I in Drancy and Bobigny. It was no longer the generation of our parents who were victims of police violence, as during the demonstrations of October 17, 1961, but ours.
MEE: The assassination of Malik Oussekine and Abdel Benyahia by the police took place three years after the “march of the Beurs” in 1983, initiated by young immigrants to denounce racist violence. A great cultural movement accompanied this mobilization and you were part of it…
RB: This period was marked by real political awareness, with the associations SOS Racisme, Touche pas à mon pote…
On the cultural level, young people from the suburbs had burst onto the scene in a very protesting spirit, such as Rachid Taha’s Carte de séjour group.
At the same time, [the writer and director] Mehdi Charef and I had started making films… We could see, in the end, that things were changing, that those who called themselves “the Beurs” no longer accepted assigned to the status of sub-citizens and demanded equality.
The long march for equality for children of North African immigrants in France
MEE: However, as you explain in Nos Frangins, this quest was not really heard, since the political leaders in power, at the time of the assassination of Malik Oussekine, refused to recognize that it was of a crime.
RB: That’s right. The assassination of Malik Oussekine and the great mobilization that the case aroused, with thousands of demonstrators in the street, nevertheless made it possible to lift the veil at that time on police violence against populations of immigrant origin.
Those who were killed by the police were always the same. We were dealing with the same cast [of young immigrants] all the time. This leaves no doubt about the motivations of the authors.
MEE: Your film mixes elements of fiction perfectly integrated into the story of Malik Oussekine’s death, with raw archive footage. Why did you choose this hybrid restitution? To give more intensity to the events by presenting them exactly as they happened?
RB: It was important that this documentary fund be integrated into the film with sequences from television news, press articles and official declarations evoking the affair.
Officials at the time such as Charles Pasqua [Minister of the Interior], Robert Pandraud [Delegate Minister for Security], Jacques Chirac [Prime Minister], François Mitterrand [President of the Republic]… somehow played second-fiddle roles in my film. I couldn’t have written dialogue that would have captured their statements better.
[Malek Oussekine’s brother] is what I was at the same time and what all the youth of my generation was. As children of immigrants, we did not want the fate inflicted on our parents to pursue us. We also wanted to do them justice
MEE: In Malek Oussekine’s family, as we see it evolve in the film, two personalities oppose each other: the student’s father, who resigns himself to the police version, and the brother who refuses it and wants to bring out the truth. More generally, isn’t it a confrontation between two generations, immigrants and their French children, who accept injustice more and more badly?
RB: Absolutely. I wanted to show in the film how a father of a family, despite the injustice he has been subjected to, tries to live with it, because he does not feel entitled to challenge anything and because he has fear.
Twenty years earlier, he may have been in the demonstrations of October 17, 1961, and had seen people die around him. This fear leads her to ask her son to stop searching for the truth and come home.
MEE: But the son, played by Reda Kateb, does not accept fate…
RB: He is what I was at the same time and what all the youth of my generation was. As children of immigrants, we did not want the fate inflicted on our parents to pursue us. We also wanted to do them justice.
This is where our revolt came from. Our parents organized their life in France differently. They thought they were doing the right thing by remaining undemanding and visible, but it didn’t work.
So we decided to take over. Each in his own way, me with the cinema, while other young people did not hesitate to confront the police.
Once arrested, they found themselves in prison before being sent to Algeria under the impetus of a law on double punishment [allowing the expulsion of individuals who do not have French nationality, already convicted of an offense or an offence], a law finally repealed and on which I made a film [ Cheb in 1991].
MEE: Is the persistence of police violence against young people in the suburbs one of the reasons that led you to make Nos Frangins?
RB: Not at all. My film is conceived as the last film in a trilogy that I have been thinking about for a long time. At the very beginning, there was Indigènes [in 2006], on the grandparents engaged during the First and Second World Wars, then Hors-la-loi [in 2010], on the parents who participated, from France to the struggle for the independence of Algeria. And now their children, through the stories of Malik and Abdel.
These three films can be seen one after the other. They restore the destiny of three successive generations.
Our parents organized their life in France differently. They thought they were doing the right thing by remaining undemanding and visible, but it didn’t work.
MEE: Do you think that the political discourse has evolved since the Oussekine affair on the issues of police violence, racism and immigration?
RB: No. It hasn’t really changed. Racism has become commonplace as immigration has become a business, especially during elections.
The height is that today, France seems to need more immigrants to fill the jobs neglected by the French.
MEE: Your film will compete for Algeria at the Oscars in March 2023, in the category of best international film. Are you confident?
RB: I have already been nominated three times for the Oscars. I don’t know if I’m going to win this time but it’s always interesting to show different cinematography and tell stories that aren’t necessarily known.
The nomination of Our Brothers at the Oscars will give it the possibility of being distributed more widely.
