‘I’d rather have prevented the Paris attacks than predicted them’ says film director

Nicolas Boukhrief explains how his powerful movie about jihadi plots, Made in France,  had to be delayed in November and why it will now be made available online

On Friday 13 November last year, French film director Nicolas Boukhrief was asleep when the telephone began to ring at around 9.30pm. A suicide bomber had just blown himself up outside the Stade de France. Boukhrief was shocked, then appalled; fiction had become fact.

His film, Made in France, which tells the story of a homegrown jihadi group planning a terrorist attack on the French capital, was due for release in four days. Four hundred promotional posters displaying an automatic rifle superimposed over the Eiffel tower and the slogan “the threat comes from within” had been plastered all over the Paris Métro 24 hours before.

And at that moment, Islamist terrorists were rampaging through the French capital carrying out shootings and suicide bombings that would leave 140 people dead.

The reality was even grimmer than Boukhrief had imagined. “Like everyone else my first thought was pure shock. Then I realised we had to get the film posters taken down. Immediately,” Boukhrief told the Observer.

“People say the film was prophetic but I’d rather have been wrong. I’d rather have prevented than predicted something. That’s the paradox. The events of 13 November mean there is enormous interest in the film because it stopped being fiction and became fact. As I director, I want my film to be a success, but I don’t want to profit from such terrible events.” Boukhrief believes, however, that those terrible events were entirely predictable.

“I’m no visionary; the Paris attacks were only new because they happened in Paris. Even before there were attacks on Barcelona, London, Boston, 9/11, Tunis... not to mention places like Yemen, Syria and Iraq.

“The only difference is they happened elsewhere. Then they happened in Paris.”

Made in France follows a group of young men from the Parisian banlieues who are drawn into following Hassan, a psychopathic French Islamic convert who has returned from training with al-Qaida in Afghanistan. Sam is a journalist who infiltrates the group by virtue of having an Algerian father. He speaks Arabic and knows the Qur’an. Christophe, who is from a bourgeois Breton family but insists on being called Yassin, is another convert and the most fanatical of the young men.

When Hassan announces they have orders to place a car bomb on the Champs Eysées as the start of a series of al-Qaida attacks across France, the two Muslim youths express doubts about “killing women and children”. By then it is too late for any of them to back out.

Boukhrief, who like Sam has an Algerian father and French mother, says he wanted to write a screenplay about Islamic terrorism after the 1995 attacks on the Paris transport network by the Algerian-based Armed Islamic Group (GIA) that killed eight and injured more than 100 people.
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With just one film to his name, he decided to wait until he had more experience of film-making and life before tackling such a complex issue.

When Mohamed Merah killed three soldiers – one a French Muslim called Mohamed Legouad – and three Jewish schoolchildren and their teacher in a series of attacks in 2012, Boukhrief decided the time was right.

“I thought Merah marked the start of something worrying in France. He was not a lone gunman, he was motivated by the idea of jihad and being a soldier for al-Qaida. I wondered what makes a young French person decide to kill French soldiers and children in France. I wondered what drives a Mohamed to kill another Mohamed.”

From the start, the film encountered obstacles. It was hard to sell, financing was tight – a relatively measly €2.8m budget funded by Canal+ – and local councils refused permission for the crews to use their streets until Boukhrief submitted a fake screenplay replacing Islamist terrorists with the Russian mafia.

“My idea of doing a film was received with some fear, but mostly indifference. Producers thought it anecdotal, marginal, not commercial. We had a hard time finding backers,” the director said.

“When filming started, al-Qaida was the main Islamic threat. It was after we began that Daesh [Islamic State] emerged. The more the film progressed, the more reality seemed to be catching up with us.”

Fact and fiction converged in January 2015 when terrorists hit Charlie Hebdo magazine and a Jewish supermarket in three days of killing that left 17 dead.

Made in France was in postproduction at the time and the distributors pulled out, blaming the subject matter. New distributors Pretty Pictures, run by Englishman James Velaise, took up the challenge and an 18 November release date was set.

After the 13 November attacks, a cinema release for Made in France seemed both impossible and insensitive. So on 29 January, the film will finally be made available online, via the video-on-demand service of French TV channel TF1. Velaise said negotiations were also at an advanced stage to distribute Made in France in the UK. “The film has become a cause célèbre in France because of 13 November, but it’s an excellent thriller with a very powerful and topical message. If it had come out on 4 November as [originally] planned, it would have been pulled from all cinemas by 14 November,” Velaise said.

Boukhrief says while he has no sympathy whatsoever for Islamist terror recruits, he can understand what drives them towards the extremes. He is critical of statements such as that made recently by French prime minister Manuel Valls that to understand the terrorists was to excuse them.
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Boukhrief recalls how at the age of eight, while living with his family in the Riviera town of Antibes, his father came home bloodied after being beaten up by rightwing vigilantes. “It was known as a ratonnade, from the word rats, which is how these fascists regarded Arab immigrants. Gangs would roam the streets to find Arabs and beat them up.

“For someone with the name Mohamed, like my father, it was a permanent, daily aggression and not just physical; you couldn’t get an apartment, or a job, or even get into a nightclub.

“But as we have seen from the French attacks, where many are converts, we can’t be racist about this or believe the stereotypes because terrorism isn’t systemically linked to immigration.”

He added: “I wanted to understand who are these young men who want to commit suicide while killing the maximum number of people in the name of an ideology? How can a country like France produce these people?

“It’s a violent film, because it’s a violent subject, but I wanted to explore where the humanity is in those who are eaten up by this ideology, this fanaticism.

“Instead of seeing these people just as psychopaths, we should ask what has made them so. Why do they have nothing to lose by blowing themselves up, why do they believe they will have this heroic destiny? What has pushed them into this ideology and fanaticism and what can we do to resolve the problems?

“I don’t excuse them or sympathise, but if we don’t understand them, if we don’t start seeing them as human beings and ask why they are doing this, where is the humanity in them, we won’t resolve the problem.

“The politicians say we are at war, but these terrorists were made in France, they are not enemies from another country, they are the children of France. We can’t declare war on them. They are French citizens.”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/j … -boukhrief