The Long Answer
By Yann Demange
Where are you from?
It’s a question I’ve always had a hard time with. And since moving to the US four years ago, I’m asked this question on a regular basis.
Maybe it’s the combination of a brownish face and London accent coupled with French names that throws people off. Who knows. But this question, and hearing it asked over and over these past few years, has forced me to confront my unresolved questions about my identity, how I grew up, and how those experiences led me to being a director. After all, in longer conversations, the question “Where are you from?” is often followed with “What made you get into film?”
People tend to like things compartmentalized and simple; a simple answer to a (seemingly) simple question, right? But it’s never been that simple for me. I’ve never actually had any sense of a ‘national identity’ or, for that matter, a sense of belonging to any one tribe.
I’m mixed race: A French white mother and an Algerian father. So, “I’m a Londoner” is my standard go-to ‘short’ response when that “Where are you from?” question comes up. That’s the simplest answer I feel comfortable giving without getting into it.
“Ah, so you’re British…” is the response I often get in the US. I always bristle a little at that one. “No, I’m a Londoner, not British…” I don’t usually follow up with an explanation for what I mean: It’s complicated, so let’s stick to the short answer, bruv.
For what it’s worth, here is the long answer:
I have never been able to identify as British. Not when I was called ‘paki’ by Brits for most of my childhood. Culturally, I don’t feel British either. Rightly or wrongly, ‘British’ always felt too wrapped in colonial connotations that I wasn’t ready to accept as part of my identity — I ain’t taking that on.
I feel the same about being French: Yes, I am a French passport holder; yes, I am legally French, but I haven’t lived in France since the age of two. Being half Algerian, I can never really comfortably take on ‘being French’ as a sole national identity either. France’s colonial past—130 years of occupying Algeria, racism, the body count of two wars and the legacy of the post-colonial Algerian experience — isn’t something I feel comfortable glossing over either.
That said, when Zinedine Zidane led a French team, made up almost entirely from the descendants of immigrants from the ‘colonies’, to win the world cup in ‘98, I celebrated for sure. He symbolized something that transcended football at a time when Le Pen was in power and France was becoming increasingly polarized. It was a special moment. I wish Zidane could make a comeback…
Twenty years later France went on to win the World Cup again. They were great, this new generation of players that included Pogba, Kante, Mbappe, and Umtiti, men who are all vibrant and own their diverse French-ness. They were inspiring. And their diversity, and what this means for French identity, didn’t go unnoticed. In a loaded joke on The Daily Show, host
Trevor Noah congratulated ‘Africa’ on their World Cup win. What he was getting at was that France owes its victories to the descendants of people from their colonies. But there is defensiveness if you dare utter this out loud. When these kids win they are French, and that is that. But during the day to day, if you don’t happen to be a football star, or scaling a wall like a superhero to rescue a child, like Mamoudou Gassama, you don’t get welcomed into the fold.
The French ambassador Gerard Araud’s reaction to this joke was hilarious:
Unlike in the United States of America, France does not refer to its citizens based on their race, religion, or origin. To us, there is no hyphenated identity. Roots are an individual reality. By calling them an African team, it seems like you’re denying their French-ness. This, even in jest, legitimizes the ideology which claims whiteness as the only definition of being French.
The hypocrisy is incredible.
Even with all this in mind, I can’t call myself an Algerian either. I grew up largely estranged from my father, and although I studied Arabic a little at one stage in my teens, I sadly don't speak it, which pains me.
Add to the mix that my mother was raised Catholic, but isn’t religious, and my father is Muslim. Yet neither ‘gave’ me a religion to follow or wanted to dictate a cultural identity for me, so it is safe to say I was left a little confused.
I once heard someone say when anything is possible it becomes too overwhelming, and it can lead to feeling like nothing is possible at all. My parents left my identity for me to figure out. Neither claimed me for their tribe.
So, at a very early age, one thing became clear to me: I’d always be an outsider. Eventually I came to realize I’d always be a Londoner, too.
Being a Londoner is something I could always accept and own. It transcends any national connotations for me. It’s a vibe, attitude, swag, banter, and it doesn’t have a flag, passport or past atrocities attached to it in the same way.
But I’m also a particular type of Londoner. One of the multicultural mongrels, coming of age in the 90s, finding expression in the rise of the Jungle, Drum & Bass and then the UK Garage music scenes. There was a common language emerging across races that bound working class Londoners living within the “melting pots,” as opposed to those posh Londoners who lived in close proximity to us but didn’t experience diversity beyond sharing a postcode.
Londoner: this was an umbrella that could keep me dry as a teenager going into my early twenties. But I no longer live in London now. That moment, that subculture, well, it isn’t really around anymore (around as I knew it, that is). So, I’m still searching for an identity, one that isn’t tied to something fleeting, but one that lies within.
So, that “where are you from” question: More often than not, what people are really asking is, what’s your ‘tribe’? And, essentially, I’ve always been tribe-less.
It can be an innocent question, and maybe one you have to expect as a foreigner with a funny accent. But it strikes to the core of something I have found profoundly complicated and difficult to resolve. An annoying existential issue I can’t shake. I thought I could ignore it, I arrogantly thought I had transcended it in some way through being a filmmaker and finding a form of expression that favours the outsider’s eye. But this—this being an outsider and seeking a sense of belonging, is something I can now see has been a theme running throughout all my work so far.
The question “where are you from?” goes to the heart of An Identity Issue I find myself forced to face all over again now that I'm somewhere I feel more out of place than ever: In a white privileged Hollywood bubble.
Moving to the States was never a goal of mine. It happened after I made a UK indie film called ’71. Surprisingly, the Hollywood film industry reacted really well to the film. Opportunities I couldn't ignore were suddenly presenting themselves, so I packed up, left my council flat in London, and off to Hollywood I went.
It was exciting, and I went from being the guy that couldn’t get into parties to, all of a sudden, being seemingly popular for the first time. It is a bubble, of course, one that has a finite window. I knew this, and I was determined to make the most of it while it lasted.
I always think of that period as though I was invited into an amazing buffet. I know they’re gonna call time on me eventually, but I’m stuffing my pockets with the smoked salmon, like Dan Aykroyd in Trading Places, all before someone calls my name and says my moment is up.
Slowly, as the dust settled and the political rhetoric of the ongoing election debates was kicking in, I started to feel a strange loneliness and discomfort. It wasn’t until my niece and nephew, two cool mixed race Londoners in their twenties, both came to stay with me for a few days that the penny really dropped. I was in a bar one night with them, our third night out in a row, and my nephew casually asked “how come everyone is white wherever we go? Where is it more… mixed…?” I mean, some of the east LA hipster spots had a marginal bit of diversity but it was shocking to us how little socio economic and racial mixing there was.
I’d gone from living in a particular part of London that was a genuine melting pot of diversity, coming from a family of multiple ethnicities, to living in the most segregated society I had ever experienced. And—get this— I was bunched in with the whites for the first time in my life. Me? One of the privileged whites?
Don’t get me wrong, London is no Mecca of Equality. We may have diversity amongst the working class communities, but that’s not to be confused with opportunities within my own industry. In fact, the diversity I’m speaking about is woefully underrepresented in the stories being told back home. When it comes to film and television, London’s lack of representation is shocking.
They are behind the US, for sure.
In fact, along with many of my —shall we say ‘ethnically diverse’—peers from the UK, I had to migrate to the US in order to have a real chance at a career with some scale. Diversity in the industry is surface level back home, as are the stories that are told in film and TV, and the material the gatekeepers gravitate towards. The glass ceiling gets hit fast.
Nobody in the game is racist, of course. Everyone is liberal and open-minded. Yet every production company you will ever walk in to is almost entirely white, with everyone coming
from a very small pool of the same posh schools. It’s not something you’re supposed to say out loud, through fear of sounding ungrateful and inviting some sort of backlash…but it’s the truth.
When it comes to film they continue to hide behind the old ‘foreign sales’ argument that stories with any ‘diversity’ are not cast-able and therefore won’t sell abroad. They always bend over backwards to find a way to jam in a white protagonist, whatever the story. I blame this, in some part, as a contributing factor to the increasing tensions back home, and the strong right wing movement. There is a lack of empathy or understanding of ‘The Other’. How can people empathize with the parts of society they only see represented in headlines and rhetoric? Thankfully, the foreign sales model is dying off and, hopefully, so will the lie it perpetuates.
In LA there were opportunities for me. But I felt completely out of sorts in the city itself. The experience triggered all my adolescent identity issues. And I’d never experienced being at the white privileged end of a racial pecking order before. Who was going to be my tribe? Where could I fit in?
In looking for an answer I had to go back to my own multicultural family:
I was born in Paris in 1977 and two years later I was an immigrant. My family moved to South London, then West. My mother is light, can’t go in the sun whiter than white. My father was born and raised in Algiers, grew up during the war for independence from France, and moved to Paris at 18. I have two older brothers, each with a different father—one is Afro Caribbean, the other is Argentinian and half Indigenous.
All three of us, my mother’s sons, are mixed race, three different mixes, and each comes with its own particular set of identity issues to navigate. I remember each one of us wrestling with the question of where we are from, what we are supposed to identify as, and not being able to help one another. We were family, but our roots led to different tribes.
One thing was for sure; the white side of our family weren’t gonna claim us for their tribe, and they couldn’t even if they wanted to.
Mum had started her own new non-white strand of the Demange family and we were, to begin with, basically a London-based unit of three.
My mother and father broke up soon after they came to London and I ended up being fostered between the ages of four and twelve, while my mum found her feet as a single mother and immigrant. I had two, four-year stints with different families in Essex. The first was with a French-speaking household, and the second was a white cockney family.
I have never quite shaken the accent that gave me…
I’d see my brother and sometimes my mother on the weekends. It wasn’t a ‘care home’, and I have no horror stories to share. The families who took me in were decent people. But they weren't my family and they certainly weren’t my tribe.
I wasn’t well received in Essex. I remember trying to reason with some white cockney kids calling me paki at school once: “I’m North African, I ain’t Pakistani…” A blank look. “You’re still a fucking paki…” And that summed it up. ‘Paki’ was how they saw anything ‘other’, between their understanding of complete whiteness and what they could clearly discern as blackness. So a fight would have to be had, nothing dramatic, just kiddie stuff, but it was frequent enough.
I put a version of this exchange in my very first short fiction film. Film has given me a way to explore some of these themes of ‘otherness’. I had never really taken the time to analyse the choices I have made in the stories I choose to tell, but of late it’s become clear that it’s all rooted in the things I’m discussing here.
When I was with that Essex foster family, I remember having to see social workers. I had pretty full-on behavioral issues by the age of nine. I was a bit of a nightmare kid and I cringe when I think back. Anyway, the social worker was trying to get to the root of my bad behavior. I wouldn’t listen to anyone, not the teachers and certainly not the cockney foster family I was living with. The only person I’d listen to was my older brother, and if there was ever an issue they’d get him on the phone.
I remember the social worker saying my ‘problem’ was that I was ‘anchorless’. That word has stayed with me. But I wear an anchor ring now, so I guess I have sorted that out…
My eldest brother, who is 17 years older than me, was my hero growing up.
Once my father was gone my brother filled that role. He was anxious to help me avoid the painful experiences of racism he’d had growing up in France, and was still experiencing as a young black man in London. He was there during the Brixton riots and had his fair share of battles with racists.
He was cool and had a sense of himself. I’d watch him play bass for hours on end, usually playing along to Jaco Pastorius’ bass riffs on Weather Reports ‘Birdsong’, on manic repeat. I wanted to be like him… but I couldn’t.
I remember how confident he was when he came back from a stint living in New York in the late 80s. It was an important, empowering trip for him. He had discovered his blackness. He was wearing Spike Lee merchandise, reading African American literature, had started playing basketball and was wearing caps, which, believe it or not, was fucking radical in London at the time. His year in New York had given him an attitude and confidence that I loved; he’d found a personal way of owning and being proud of his blackness. It was unapologetic and I wanted in.
He’d include me in his experience as much as he could, but at the same time was mindful that I was not the same race as him. I remember us having a heated exchange over my love for NWA, the Straight Outta Compton album being the first vinyl record I ever bought myself. I was obsessed with hip hop culture and black movies, but there was an implicit understanding that I was immersing myself in another tribe’s culture, not my own, and it had to be done with respect and careful consideration.
This was round about the time that Tim Burton’s Batman came out, which was the same year that Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing was released, the latter being the cultural phenomenon of the year, and a bit of a game changer. My brother came home wearing a t-shirt with the Batman logo, except it said ‘Blackman’. I remember thinking that was the coolest thing in the world. I wanted one! It was awkward for my brother but he had to explain why I couldn’t wear that. He was black. I wasn’t… I know, but we’re family right…? Nah, cultural and ethnic identity don’t work that way, bro.
But I hadn’t known where else to look. There were no North African kids at my inner London comprehensive school. The playground seemed divided into whites and blacks. So, I ended up with the West Indian kids, along with a few of the South Asian kids. They were the ones that would have us. We were ‘in’ but also the ‘outsiders’ too.
The confusion even extended to my name.
My given first name is actually Mounir, but my brother convinced my mother to change it to Yann. He had experienced so much racism as a young black man in France, and he told my mother I would have the same fate as an Algerian. So Mounir was moved and became my middle name once my father left, and I was too young to have a say.
At this point they thought we’d be moving back to France soon and my brother wanted to protect me. The way he saw it I was ‘white-passing’ so why flag up my ethnicity with my name? His skin color couldn't be hidden, but perhaps my Algerian side could.
I wonder if on some level he was right? Would Mounir Hanine be a filmmaker too? Either way, it was a change motivated by love, for sure, but it definitely accentuated the identity confusion to come. Perhaps Mounir Demange would have had a clearer sense of tribe. Perhaps he would have been ‘claimed’ or embraced into the North African community more… Who knows?
During the school holidays my middle brother, who is seven years older than me, would come to visit us in London. He never lived with us in the end. He was having his own complicated identity struggle, wrestling with being part Indigenous South American, yet looking the whitest of the siblings and growing up in the roughest part of Paris.
Barbès in the 18’th Arrondissement in the early 90s was no joke. Funnily enough his biggest antagonists growing up would be the local Algerian kids. I won’t attempt to tell his story, I don’t know it well enough, but I should add that he was also a bit of a hero for me. He started martial arts at seven years old, was a great graffiti artist, and was the one who read in our family. Devouring books, he’d tell me stories and expose me to different philosophies and points of view. He was a good storyteller and this too would have a big influence on me. I remember when he got a Native American’s head tattooed on his chest. I thought it was the coolest thing ever, that expression of identity, and at 15 I went and got one done too. My mother went mad. My middle brother was always very kind about my tattoo mishap and never mentioned it. But my eldest brother laughed his head off…“You’re not part Indigenous, bro!”
Seriously, what the fuck was I doing? Cultural appropriation, I believe they call it. On top of it all, it was a fucking shit tattoo, done by a shit artist. The amount of comments I’ve had off North Africans who have seen that tattoo…
“Is that an Indian’s head…?”
“Yeah”
“…why?”
“Oufff, it’s complicated, bro.”
The tattoo aged badly and I’d eventually just lie to people and say it was a portrait of my mother. I’d be straight up deadpan about it, and that would nip the conversation about my shit tattoo in the bud nice and quickly. Let’s not mention the tattoo again, please.
But I really wanted my own culturally empowering moment like my eldest brother had experienced in New York: it felt like the missing piece I needed. I called my father. I wanted to go to Algeria and meet my family. He was delighted. There was a further complication at this point though, something he wanted to tell me:
I had one more brother I didn’t know about. We shared a father and we were only five months apart. A bit of a surprise. His mother was Algerian, which meant he was 100 percent Algeri an, yet his mother wanted him to assimilate, so she’d given him a French name too! She wasn’t teaching him Arabic either! My father has never called him by his French name to this day. Just like he has never, and will never, call me Yann.
I went to Paris to meet my ‘new’ brother. He was living the Parisian urban Algerian disenfranchised experience. (Later, in our 20s, whenever we hung out together in Paris, we were always seen as Algerian and as a result I palpably got a glimpse of what that meant in Paris. We could never get into any bars or clubs together, the vibe was always tense and hostile, and you could forget about being able to get a taxi, too.)
It’s strange, but when we are together we both feel it, that somehow we are undeniably part of the disenfranchised post-colonial North African diaspora tribe, yet we are also estranged from it in some ways. Since then I have come to learn this is quite a common condition, because many first generation North Africans were so desperate to assimilate, settle, and put the conflict behind them, they often didn’t pass their culture on to their offspring. This is a legacy that is unravelling in a big way in France right now.
I needed to go back to the source. So in the summer of 1991 I went to Algeria. I remember the feeling when I first got there, of looking around and seeing that the majority of people looked like me. It was undeniable that I was from this tribe, genetically speaking at least. I couldn’t speak Arabic and though I was trying to make an effort to live as a Muslim at the time, I didn’t know how to truly be one.
I was still an outsider.
The thing that was emotionally powerful for me was meeting my grandparents, aunts and cousins. I’d never had grandparents before this. They took me in their arms and cried. No reservations or holding back. Just an outpouring of love. I was moved to tears. They were strangers to me, but I was not a stranger to them. I was family and they made me feel it.
When I was there I got very sick and no one could figure out what was wrong. It was some sort of virulent food poisoning. I was delirious with fever, puking and the rest. They took me to various doctors and two hospitals where I was given a load of injections, but nothing was working.
My family there believe in alternative Islamic healers. When my aunt had severe anaemia they took her down to the Algerian Sahara where a healer said prayers and put drops made from herbs and plants in her nose and eyes. Apparently all the yellow from her skin started pouring out of her as he chanted… I couldn't buy this, but I let it go…
But conventional medicine wasn't seeming to help, anyway. It was getting worse. At one point I remember waking up, fevered and delirious, to my grandmother and aunt praying over me in their hijabs, sprinkling some shit on me—can’t for the life of me remember what.
I couldn't share their beliefs, but being that close to someone with utter conviction in their faith and watching the ‘performance’ of the ritual was hypnotizing and soothing. I surrendered to it, just letting go. It’s like how a performance in a film can transcend your personal beliefs and make you emotionally identify with a character’s point of view. Anyway, the experience felt powerful, and I got better.
Probably the injections.
I stayed in Algeria for a few weeks. It was an important trip for me, I was having my own mini version of my brother’s New York trip. Something in me was being soothed. It took me a while to let go and think of these new people as family. Once I did, I really fell for my grandparents. My grandfather wasn’t much of a talker, but it was fascinating to hear him describe growing up during the French occupation. How strange to think I had ‘history’, that I had a tribe who I had been estranged from, that I was part of a larger narrative I wasn’t aware of. As far as he was concerned I was one of them and that was that.
It was on this trip that I first saw The Battle of Algiers when my cousins screened it for me. My family were incredibly proud of the film, as many Algerians are, but they were particularly proud and obsessed with the film because my aunt had starred in it. She played the beautiful woman who plants the bomb in the milk bar. This was the only time she had ever acted in anything.
Pontecorvo used a lot of non-actors making the film, something I would later do myself. I loved the fact he used real people and channeled who they were and what they could bring. Not only does this give the people you are depicting some ownership over their story, but the sense of authenticity and the experiences they bring to the process can help a film to feel truly immersive, rather than a story ‘told’, I think.
So, I had ‘returned’ to the family and I would now come every school holiday and get to know them all properly, and perhaps start to have a sense of tribe. Or so I thought. It was 1991 and in the background a political conflict was brewing. The FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) had won the local elections so the government cancelled the national elections. It wasn’t really safe for me to go to certain places. With my Nike Air Max and London ways I was the kind of ‘not true Muslim’ that would be deemed a heretic and possibly attacked.
The shit really hit the fan a few months after I returned to London, when an all-out civil war broke out. Over 250,000 people died over the proceeding decade. Every time a school holiday came around it was too dangerous for me to risk going back to see my family. They wouldn’t risk me coming back while it was like this. I never saw them again. I have not been back to Algeria since that original trip. My grandparents passed away and it was even deemed too unsafe for me to attend their funerals.
Throughout all this, knowing my aunt had been in The Battle of Algiers strengthened my love for film. As absurd as it sounds, on some level I think I felt like I had discovered an inheritance to some sort of personal lineage in movies. It gave me a kind of personal connection and claim to film. I may just be projecting this onto it now though, of course; the human need to try and make sense of, and find meaning in, narratives being so strong.
Either way, it was around this time that I started watching a lot of films. In them I sought comfort and some understanding of how I could find a place in the world. It wasn’t a conscious search. I’d watch anything and everything I could get my hands on. I watched all my mother’s French movies: a lot of Belmondo flicks (she had a thing for him), Truffaut, God dard, and a lot of trashy French pulp. At the time Channel 4 used to show films from all over the world at night. Carpenter movies, Walter Hill, Kurusawa, Melville, Fellini, Peckinpah, Scorsese, Spike Lee, Sydney Lumet… so many amazing films. And the BBC was backing some incredible voices like Alan Clarke and Ken Loach, both of whom have been big influences…with a sprinkling of Hammer Horror to freak me out too.
I never thought of film as a possible ‘career path’; the notion would have been absurd to me
at the time. It was simply my medicine, my comfort and escape. Film showed me there were so many people out there living so many different lives and they were all really complicated. I found comfort in that.
I started making short films as a way of exploring the themes that preoccupied me. I have no idea how it happened but I eventually ended up having a career as a director. It’s still very surreal to me that I have been ‘let in’. Somehow, I’ve found a way to use my ‘inside out sider’s gaze’ – as long as I don’t get found out, that is.
As I started to work more, I didn’t want to be limited to my own personal stories. I was beginning to repeat myself as a writer and learnt to value collaborating with other writers, coming up with stories I wouldn’t necessarily have thought of.
Top Boy was my first chance to do that on a bigger canvas, more so than my previous short films or TV work. It was, at the time, the most personal piece I’d made in television. It offered an opportunity to explore some themes I was preoccupied with. It also allowed me to put in some experiences I had growing up in London. The drug crime genre was just a through-line from which I could explore things I knew and cared about: being a young boy, being raised by a struggling single mother, wondering which tribe to join.
For Ranell, the thirteen year-old protagonist, the question was whether he would join the gang, or go it alone and be his own man. I didn’t share his narrative but I could find ways to connect to him. For instance, I could never sleep as a kid, something that remains a problem to this day. I’d often stare out of the window at night, not having the intellectual capacity to make sense of any of it, particularly during my years being fostered. Nothing has changed of course… I remember putting that in the series.
I went on to do a similar thing with ‘71, which is set in Belfast at the height of the sectarian violence during ‘The Troubles’. It tells the story of an18 year-old English soldier separated from his platoon and stranded after a riot. His journey unfolds over 24 hours as he tries to survive and get back to safety. When I first read Gregory Burkes’ incredible screenplay I saw that this was an opportunity to make a personal film.
This story was, after all, about tribes.
What I saw in the protagonist, played by Jack O’Connel, was a boy looking for his people and a sense of belonging. This was an aspect I brought to the story. I could project some of my own struggles onto the characters in the world I was an outsider to. It seems to me that boys seeking a tribe and seeking the paternal are often the ones recruited to join the army,
gangs, and militias. They are promised family but, of course, a terrible betrayal takes place as these boys are so quickly sacrificed and pitted against other boys seeking the same, boys they often have more in common with than those they are taking orders from.
Kids being robbed of their childhoods is something that makes me angry and something I’ve found myself subconsciously revisiting.
I’ve just finished my first American ‘movie’, based on a true story, called White Boy Rick. A father-son story set in Detroit in the mid-80s during the crack epidemic, it’s a film about a 14 year-old named Rick, the only white kid left in east side of Detroit after ‘white flight’, who becomes completely immersed in the African American community. He’s an outsider, an ‘inside outsider’, like so many of my protagonists have been.
Matthew McConaughey plays the father. Alongside this major star, I cast a 15 year-old street kid from Baltimore as the lead. A kid who himself lives immersed in a tribe that isn’t his own, which is something you can’t fake at that age. He’d never so much as done a drama class before.
I arrived in the US whilst making the film, a strange time to move here. When I arrived, Trump was gearing up to run for president and a Brexit movement was brewing back home. We know how that all turned out. The landscape has changed. People seem increasingly re luctant to engage with ‘the other’ right now and there is a global shift towards nationalism. Everyone is tribing up again and calling each other out. Lines are being drawn in the sand.
“Show me the boy and I’ll show you the man.” At 41 years old I can hear that saying ringing in my ears. I haven’t managed to outrun the question of identity. I find myself back where I started, only follicley challenged this time around (the bald tribe being the one tribe I unwill ingly find myself claimed by).
I guess my tribe is the tribe-less. I have come to terms with the fact that I will remain a per petual outsider. That doesn't mean the loneliness and sadness that comes with it at times will ever go away. I certainly haven’t found any profound answers. I suspect my list of questions is only going to keep growing.
Maybe in my case identity isn’t something that can truly be squared up and ‘resolved’, but I know I have to keep engaging with it, as it keeps evolving and shifting. But it’s also clear that the problem of identity and tribelessness is why, and how, I got into making films. It’s all linked to the question of “what stories am I going to tell?” with the opportunities that have now opened up… ‘Whose stories’ do I want to focus on?
Being in a city where I don't fit in, I'm now a different kind of outsider: Not a French/Alger ian in a black London school, but a French/Algerian/Londoner in white Hollywood. But now I know who I am. I am an outsider. Yes, I'm still seeking. Yes, it’s still confusing, but what I do as a filmmaker is embrace that question mark.
I know firsthand the importance of telling the stories of people who are underrepresented, particularly during a time when the discourse is becoming increasingly black and white. As the capacity for empathy towards people deemed ‘other’ to one’s own tribe gets more di luted, there is a responsibility to tell stories that engage with “others,” whatever their tribe.
Fuck being judgemental or self-righteous; there is too much of that going around right now. That, sprinkled with a little too much earnestness… it’s nauseating. Who are we to judge? People’s lives are complicated, after all. It is by digging deep into that complexity that we find the universality in their experience. There is no universality without specificity.
So, I’ll continue to explore outsiders in storytelling in the hopes that it may someday unlock something for me, or lead to some sort of inner peace.
And I’ll continue giving my short answer to the question “Where are you from?”… Because as you can see, the alternative answer can go on for-fucking-ever, innit.