Abdellatif Kechiche received the Palme d’Or last night at the 2013 Cannes Festival awarded by the jury chaired by Steven Spielberg, for his film Blue Is the Warmest Color. No doubt, when receiving this award, he reminisced about his childhood dreams, when from his housing complex in Les Moulins in Nice, he could see the legendary Victorine studios on the hill opposite.
Because although he was born in Tunisia, as he recalled last night, it was indeed in Nice, where he arrived at the age of 6, that Kechiche discovered a genuine passion for cinema.
Seed of a Star in Les Moulins
As a teenager, when he wasn’t accompanying his brother, the boxing champion, to a match, he would lock himself in the dark rooms of Nice cinemas whenever he could, gorging on the great classics of Pasolini, Ozu, Tati, Sautet, King Vidor, or Eisenstein at the cinematheque.
He then developed his acting talents at the Antibes conservatory and performed in several productions on the Côte d’Azur, notably a play by Federico Garcia Lorca in 1978 and A Balcony on the Andes by Eduardo Manet the following year, before directing the staging of The Architect at the Avignon Festival in 1981.
For his first film, Blame It on Voltaire with Sami Bouajila and Elodie Bouchez, he received a Golden Lion for a first work at the Venice Film Festival in 2000.
In 2003, he wrote and directed Games of Love and Chance with amateur actors and an extremely tight budget, sweeping all the César Awards from under the noses of The Chorus and A Very Long Engagement: Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Promising Actress for Sara Forestier.
The Secret of the Grain
And when he directed The Secret of the Grain in 2006, Abdellatif Kechiche wanted to film in Nice, where he had his first cinematic emotions, and entrusted his father with the film’s lead role, portraying a worker of Maghrebi origin who wants to shift to the restaurant business. This echoed his own father’s life, a former construction worker of Tunisian origin, who moved to Nice with his entire family when Abdellatif was 6.
However, his father’s death that year prompted him to change his plans, setting the story in Sète, although he did give the lead role to a former colleague of his father. His film received a triumphant reception in Venice, where it earned the Grand Jury Prize, and won the Louis Delluc Prize in 2007 and the same César Awards as Games of Love and Chance in 2008, outpacing the favorites: La Vie en Rose, A Secret, or The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
His next film, Black Venus, his first period film, was part of the 2010 selection at the Venice Film Festival.
Seed of the Palme
He won the Palme d’Or at the latest Cannes festival for Blue Is the Warmest Color, the adaptation of the comic book Blue Angel by Julie Maroh, which is expected to be released in theaters next October.
Issa Nissa!
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