DIAMS. The rapper Diam’s is back with a documentary entitled “Salam”, in which she tells “her truth”, from her success to her media retirement.
[Mis à jour le 27 mai 2022 à 17h57] “How many of us were pretending?” After ten years of silence, Diam’s returns to the front of the stage. Or rather the screen. In a documentary called Salam, the rapper tells her story, from her meteoric rise to her media disappearance, passing through success, tragedies and her conversion to Islam. The former rapper, now 41, left France for Saudi Arabia, where she lives with her husband, former Franco-Tunisian rapper Faouzi Tarkhani and her three children.
In an interview with Parisian, she defines herself as a “mother hen, gaga.” “My life revolves around them. My daughter, Maryam, is 10, my sons, Abraham and Luqman, are 7 and 5,” Diam’s adds. If the former star explains that she has turned the page on her musical career, even if music remains “central to (her) life”, as she confides to Brut, she keeps close ties of friendship with the singer Vitaa. “With Charlotte (Vitaa’s real first name), our friendship has never changed. We were two little ‘girls’ who spent evenings together. Today, we are two mothers who meet in the afternoon”, explains Diam’s to the Parisian.
Today, far from the stage, she explains living off what she earned at the time: “My mother, who worked in a record company, managed things well for me. I was not in need. .” With her husband, Diam’s had the project to create a travel agency, Hegire, which was to organize pilgrimages to Mecca. “With my husband, we are thinking of reopening it, but we don’t know when or in what form. We can always accompany private groups on site. We’ll see, explains Diam’s to the newspaper.
Where to see the documentary Salam de Diams?
The film Salam, which was presented at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday May 26, will be released in theaters on July 1 and 2, then will be available on the BrutX platform at the start of the school year. Before this release, a trailer of Salam, directed by Diam’s, Houda Benyamina and Anne Cissé, was unveiled on social networks. We discovered the first images of the documentary, narrated by the interpreter of The Dumpling.
“For years, people knocked on my door asking me for permission to put my life on stage, to play it, to interpret it. Many requests for documentaries, biopics, series have not ceased to flow . I had the feeling that I was being asked to give the keys to my life so that others could make a film of it. A show”, wrote the interpreter of The Dumpling on Instagram announcing the upcoming release of the documentary.
The project that she finally agreed to carry out is therefore called Salam. It was written and directed by three women, Diam’s herself and directors Houda Benyamina (who received three Césars for her film Divines) and Anne Cissé. The documentary traces the life and career of Mélanie Georgiades, the artist’s real name, who announced her retirement from the stage in 2012.
“Salam offered me the means to tell, with my vision, my emotion and my words what I call: my truth. There is certainly the story of Diam’s behind the woman I am today, but it is also a human story, and a quest that can echo the story of so many people”, also writes the rapper in the same Instagram post.
Diam’s evokes its dazzling success, but also its flaws, its doubts and the reverse side of the celebrity medal. She discusses, for example, her psychiatric internment in 2008: “It’s the beginning of the nightmare, they take your phone, they cut you off from the world, sometimes they stick machines on your head, they barely listened to me. J continued to harm myself. They extinguished me with pills and I fell into the hell of drugs.”