Younes Haidar and Zohra Benhammou, two young Belgian filmmakers, accompanied the young people from Peterbos to the Spanish Pyrenees two years ago. On their return, they produced a documentary simply titled “Rupture”.
The film premiered at the Docville documentary film festival in Leuven. The general public will have to wait until May 9 at 9 p.m. and 11 p.m., then May 12 at 8 p.m. to watch this medium-length film (52 minutes entirely produced in French) on the Flemish Brussels media. Bruzz who produced the documentary.
For Younes Haidar, the production was a unique media and human experience. It was a bit by chance that the subject came across him. “Khalid, D’Broej’s coordinator, knew a journalist from Bruzz who had done a report with young people about six years ago. Khalid wanted to invite this journalist on a breakthrough trip, but the journalist has since changed careers. The subject was proposed to Zohra and me because we had already worked quite a bit on youth, remembers the filmmaker. Personally, this is a subject that fascinates me, especially since I find that it is often reported in the media in a stigmatizing way, he continues. This way of reducing young people to delinquency can sometimes be destructive. With Bruzz, we wanted to do something else. Not to deny reality, but to show its other facets. Because everything is not negative in working-class neighborhoods.”
Physically tough, emotionally intense
When you arrived at Peterbos, Younes Haidar knew nothing about the neighborhood, except the facts related to drug trafficking reported in the press. Did he have any fears or apprehensions? “No, on the contrary, we were honored to be invited to the breakup trip, he replies. From the first meeting, the young people shared their pizzas with us. There was a caring atmosphere that was natural. I learned to appreciate Peterbos from what I saw with my own eyes. I noticed that there, young people constitute a kind of big family. It may sound cliché, but it’s reality.”
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He pursues : “Then there was this trip. Physically, it was hard because we had to film in conditions that were sometimes harsh. The young people were involved and gave themselves over for our documentary. It was touching, testifies again Younes Haidar. For the rest, it was a question of Zohra and I being integrated into the dynamic of the group. So I can say that I too experienced a breakup. I was lucky enough to grow up in a wealthier, greener neighborhood, so I didn’t leave with the same baggage. But it is undeniable: I too came out transformed by this experience. With this project, Peterbos demonstrates that it can be a wonderful sociological laboratory”.
And to conclude: “So, yes, delinquency exists and we have to ask ourselves why. We heard a lot that our documentary told a positive story as if our goal was to make things better. However, that was not at all our objective. What has been portrayed is simply reality. We wanted to show – without truncating the reality concerning young people in working-class neighborhoods – that Peterbos is not limited to drug trafficking. Far from there.”
