“France is on fire” in the powerful short film by Fodil Drici

A black screen is accompanied by footsteps. Then, some contextual information appears: it is April 24, 2022, the day of the second round of the presidential election, and “the French are marching through the capital”. The footsteps are not those of a crowd but of a single person, “V., a suburban resident”, who descends the steps of her tower to “perform[r] his weekly journey to Paris in search of entertainment… and coffee”. Just over seven minutes long, Grande Latte Disprezzo, the short film by Fodil Drici, consists of a walking expedition illustrated by “different techniques “, confides the director to us: “We have traditional animation, sequences made on paper, 3D for the opening plan of ‘fall’ of the camera and fall of the clothes, and shooting real. The last sequence is a mix between animation and live action.” Produced as part of an Arte commission from the Kourtrajmé collective (of which the artist is a member), the short film condenses recurring themes from his work, stories “of borders, of passing information, of awareness”, by dealing with a reality that affects him and that the media does not necessarily relay: “[C’est la réalité] young people around me, that of my sisters, mine too.”Telling distance in a graphic and narrative wayFodil Drici also decided to show “two graphically quite distant universes”, in order to represent the distance felt between Paris and the suburbs and the way in which V., on this rebellious April 24, “is not aware of what is at stake, disconnected from the issues of this day”: “She will only discover the images of what took place on this day so carefree for her that once in front of her TV. The focus is therefore first on this question: what do I, and do we, feel like? […] great difficulties when you live in the suburbs. The estrangement from culture, from entertainment and, more dangerously, from current events. I have the feeling that the information remains blocked at the border that is the ring road. That, finally, Paris has only a blurred vision of what the suburbs are experiencing and that a young suburban resident can very quickly be disconnected from the issues that concern France but which are not discussed, wrongly, only inside Paris.”Grande Latte Disprezzo tells a story of borders, but also of links. The character of Fodil Drici “may be aware of the drama of this day”, he imagines , but, for “her survival”, she cannot see her: “It is the fact of finding herself in front of the images the same evening and in front of this channel which tells her that France is on fire which will make her join the movement and the fire that she finally had for a long time in her. This disillusion which is beginning to fragment also interests me. Between these moments when we try at all costs to stay in the matrix and the moments when our brain cannot absorb so many images, pain, contempt.” A walk against the grain Telling this story through a character who walks is not The filmmaker notes a rule of cinema “which says that the good guys always go from left to right”: “What’s funny is that in the case of my character, it’s the opposite direction to the reality. To travel from 93 to Châtelet, go from right to left. And this character who walks during this day in the wrong direction illustrates the words of the film well. “Centered around youth and their relationship to politics, the film obviously resonates with current events – including the blocking of the Sorbonne, in recent days, by young people who expressed their anger at the results of the first round of the election.”I would say that this film speaks of the situation in which the majority of French youth find themselves, overflowing with images, violence, of contempt suffered, of consumption, and under pressure for too long. The first round of the election will not have helped her to have more confidence in the future and I am afraid that on the 24th [avril prochain] is not more pleasing.”Finally, in a more concrete way linked to the world of cinema, Fodil Drici notes the lack of diversity within animated cinema, “among its artists but also in the representations it offers”: ” There is no suburban activity, because it is a long apprenticeship which only takes place in very expensive schools and there is only a minority of young people who can afford to finance these schools. I took a longer, more circuitous route to learn how to do all of this. It was important for me to talk about subjects that we don’t talk about in animation but also to represent faces that are only too little represented”, concludes the artist. You can find Fodil Drici’s work on his Instagram account and his short film on the Arte website.