The director of “our brothers” considers that, if the situation has evolved a little, a lot remains to be done for the situation of immigrants.
words collected by Jacques Mandelbaum
Born in Paris, sixty-nine years ago, living in Bobigny and Drancy (Seine-Saint-Denis) until its 30th anniversary, Rachid Bouchareb, of Algerian origin, is, with its first red stick feature ( 1985), one of the pioneers of what was called “Beur cinema” at a time that we can now quietly qualify as ancient. However, Bouchareb, however, filmed almost nothing. He only dreams of departures, moreover, often from America, where he already ships the three lads of red stick. The fact remains attached to the memory and the history of his own: Indigenous (2006), first French fiction on Algerian skirmishers, or outlaw (2010), on the march towards Algerian independence , as shown by. Our brothers, evocation of the double assassination, in 1986, of Malik Oussekine and Abdel Benyahia by the French police, is made to this brand.
in 1986, you are 33 years old and you have just realized your First feature film. What then represents, for the French citizen that you are, the double murder of this night of December 5?
Like many people, it touched me a lot. We must not forget that there had been before very important anti-racist movements, the march of the Beurs in 1983, SOS-racism in 1985, which advocated fraternity and which led us strongly to hope in an improvement of the situation in France. And then now the Oussekine affair brutally brought us back to the massacres of October 1961 to Charonne, even if the violent deaths of Arabs in France, it never stopped. For me, it is clear that there is a tragic continuity there.
why, in your opinion, this resurgence, today, of the memory of this drama, both in your film and in the series Broadcast on Disney+ who preceded it?
I think it’s pure coincidence. For my part, it had been twenty-five years since I had this project. Our brothers, I thought about it at the same time as Indigenous and outlaws. This is the continuation of the same story. Grandparents on the Front of the Second World War. Parents who land in France in the 1960s. And the first generation of children born in this country.
The two cases, which do not take place in the same context, are they from this time related between them?
I don’t remember that they’ve ever been. The circumstances of the death of Malik Oussekine put all the light on this affair. The Latin quarter. Student demonstrations. The police in uniform. Voltigeurs. Abdel Benyahia, who intervenes to put an end to a brawl, gets shot by a drunk police officer, in civilian clothes, in a puppet cafe. Even today, I come across many former demonstrators of the time during the film’s previews, none heard of Benyahia.
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