Hassan Guerrar has a sense of staging. The interview he gives on a rainy September morning in Paris is a vivid illustration of this. He directs from a distance, as he would a sequence shot, the short journey which separates the Barbès-Rochechouart metro station from the meeting place. From the intersection of boulevards Barbès and de la Chapelle, where his film opens, we pass in front of the staircase where Malek, his main character (played by Sofiane Zermani), meets the young people of the neighborhood. Then it’s the butcher’s where he buys a little later an ersatz powdered chorba, the tobacco bar from another scene, the Algerian fast-food restaurant where a protagonist goes to eat skewers…
These few blocks, these blocks of buildings are its setting. An intimate map pinned to his heart. There he appears, chatting on the terrace with his «pots» of which he made characters. Every ten minutes, he calls out to a passerby in Arabic, then adds as an aside: “He had five days of filming! »
Hassan Guerrar, 57, has just made his first feature film, Barbès, little Algeria. An assumed self-portrait – although “fictionalized”, he insists. His hero, Malek, is in his thirties, a family left behind « bled » with whom he is at odds. He has succeeded in life but finds himself, when the Covid-19 pandemic hits, confined in the open air with his ghosts and his origins in this district in the north of Paris, a mecca for 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 defector, as they say today.
Blédard of the seventh art, Barbésien who knows by heart the filmography of Patrice Chéreau and André Téchiné, this figure of French cinema, who has worked in the shadows for forty years, trembles today at having thus exposed himself, all by displaying the bravado ambition to finally be seen, recognized. ” Love “, he said simply.
Cajole the 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, for years, been the watchdog who watches over some of the biggest names in auteur cinema. Abdellatif Kechiche, Céline Sciamma, Thierry de Peretti and Audrey Diwan have been loyal to him since their beginnings.
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