Intervju med Faouzi Bensaïdi
Faouzi Bensaïdi har de siste årene etablert seg som en de største filmskaperne i dagens filmlandskap. Bli bedre kjent med filmskaperen i dette intervjuet.
«A film will not change the world, but it can change a person’s life.»
Moroccan film director Faouzi Bensaïdi fell in love with arts at an early stage of his life. Now he’s ready with his third feature film Death for Sale, which premiered at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival. The film centers around three young, unemployed men who decide to rob a jewellery store.
Bensaïdi’s debut feature A Thousand Months (2003) was shown in Cannes where he won the Award of the Youth and Le Premier Regard Award. It was an immediate breakthrough for the visionary director who tells us that he had to work hard for a long time to get to the point of directing a feature film.
– I did everything at the beginning: scripts, sets, costumes, posters, and some acting too, he says. We asked him why he wanted to become a filmmaker in the first place;
– I felt comfortable at the theatre, circus or cinema, at a very early point in life. I started going to the theatre, as the cinema was more expensive, if not completely inaccessible, back then. To create new worlds and fantasies became an existential need to me. Theatre seemed to me like the obvious path on my way to the cinematic world (you have the actors, the script, the lights, etc.), but I realize today that, among all the art forms, theatre is actually far detached from cinema even though you use similar materials. Cinema is closer to music, painting, architecture, etc.
Bensaïdi says that he is particularly influenced by the great directors Orson Welles, Federico Fellini and Alfred Hitchcock. But most of all he is inspired by the everyday life in the streets of Morocco:
–The street is a fabulous daily staged performance, especially in a country like Morocco. People live a lot outside; nothing is really organized so that, at once, poetry appears at every street corner.
When asked about the purpose of making films, Bensaïdi's answer is quite clear:
– To share an experience, a vision of our world and of cinema with the audience. A film will not change the world, but it can change a person’s life.
When the subject is changed to the future of cinema, Bensaïdi becomes more serious and concerned:
– Cinema is here to stay and will always win. People have very often predicted its death. I find celluloid to be a fantastic period for cinema, even though that might make me a romantic or a melancholic. However, a film carried by a filmmaker’s vision will always be an exceptional work and experience. The disappearance of the collective experience in the film theatres might be a hard blow to cinema. What really worries me is beyond the cinematic world. We live in a world with a deficit of ideas, and this shows through the arts. Communication, packaging and marketing take over everything and minor works often take a dimension that has nothing to do with their cinematic quality. The films produced are starting to look like the prevailing media, TV and the Internet, which are of an appalling poverty, and everyone is finding this fantastic. This is very sad. Who could nowadays produce and distribute The Leopard without asking Visconti to cut it further as the rhythm is too slow and the film length unacceptable for TV channels!!!
We showed three of Bensaïdi's films at the festival. Here you can watch the teaser's for two of them: