Julien Colonna is very clear on the subject: you had to be Corsican to make The Kingdom discovered in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. The action takes place in 1995 where a teenager, played by the astonishing Ghjuvanna Benedetti in her first role, discovers the world of violence in which her father operates.
“To talk about Corsica in the mid-1990s, it seems essential to me to have experienced this period in this place,” explains the director to 20 Minutes. Jeanne Herry, director of Pupil and of I will always see your faces lent a hand to the filmmaker to write this thrilling and violent story around a powerful story of filial love.
A realistic fiction
“What I’m telling is not autobiographical,” insists the director, “but the relationship between father and daughter is quite close to the one I experienced with my own father. Jeanne helped me construct a fiction that is not a work of memory. » We are reassured to see that deadly rivalries between various clans have not been part of Julien Colonna's daily life. Unlike him, the young girl will quickly find herself immersed in a brutal world whose issues she gradually understands.
“If the plot is invented, the environment that I describe is realistic,” declares the director. The action takes place during a critical time for Corsica, a decade when politics, nationalism and business were intertwined. » These fratricidal wars are seen through the eyes of a heroine who apprehends them at the same time as the spectator. Like her, we no longer know who to trust in the middle of the settling of scores where only a father figure as worrying as charismatic appears.
A life on the margins
“What interested me was not so much the clan war as the way in which the marginal life choices of these men influenced the lives of those who made them like those around them and more particularly their children.” The heroes of the film fascinate like specters that only the desire for revenge keeps alive. “It’s a bit as if they were already dead because they are carried away in an infernal spiral,” describes Julien Colonna. Its actors, most of them beginners, reinforce the impression of immersion in the heart of the Kingdom.
“Revenge allows us to delve into the darkest side of the human soul,” insists the filmmaker. Great artists have already done it before and better than me. This is why I insisted that the plot be closely linked to a Corsica which would never be shown like a postcard. It could have taken place anywhere but nowhere else. »
Two faces of Corsica
We glimpse vacationers unaware of the tragedies unfolding around them in these wild landscapes, the contrast is only stronger between their peaceful lives and those of doomed heroes. “I have never experienced this kind of thing directly but all Corsicans have been exposed to it in one way or another,” declares Julien Colonna. We feel his love for what he defines as a “paradise on earth and a land of drama” in every second of the Kingdom.
