The new “Arab of the future” by Riad Sattouf, the rise of Donald Trump at the cinema and the story of the zombies of Quai Branly

2024-10-08 17:02:49

In Tout Public Tuesday 8 October 2024, Riad Sattouf for “I, Fadi, the Stolen Brother”, director Ali Abbasi for the release of the biopic “The Apprentice” and the “Zombis” exhibition at the Quai Branly museum.

Published on 08/10/2024 19:02

Reading time: 22 minutes

“I, Fadi, the stolen brother”, “The Apprentice” and the “Zombis” exhibition. (BOOKS OF THE FUTURE – APPRENTICE PRODUCTIONS ONTARIO INC. / PROFILE PRODUCTIONS 2 APS / TAILORED FILMS LTD / DCM /- MUSEE DU QUAI BRANLY)

While we thought the saga of The Arabic of the future having come to an end with the sixth volume, Riad Sattouf had not told everything about his family history and published the following: I, Fadi, the stolen brother. This time, the reader is confronted with the darker side of the story, where we follow the story of his brother kidnapped as a child and taken to Syria by his father.

Riad Satouff confided to Tout Public that the project to tell this story dates back to the moment he found his brother Fadi, and that he managed to get the answers to the questions he asked himself. “There was something unsaid in my brother’s story when he told me about itexplains the cartoonist about this project kept secret for years. I didn’t know how to bring it, how to make it understandable to people. And I wanted there to be the first six volumes of The Arabic of the futurebefore telling Fadi’s story.”

Through this new series of the saga, the author also wanted to tell the story of childhood, and his ability to adapt to the most tragic situations.

It is melancholy to think that in the end a small child adapts to everything, to every situation, to every society (…), to all the environments of life into which he will find himself thrown.

Riad Sattouf

on franceinfo

From this point of view Riad Sattouf remains an intimate author, which does not detract from his political significance. In fact, he explains that he is free from any ideological attachment by creating, to tell the story of life “chiaroscuro”realizing it “full of doubts”which allows us to get closer “of a certain ‘truth'”.

The one who wanted to bring complexity into fiction to be as close as possible to reality is also the director Ali Abassi for his biopic The Apprenticewhich traces the rise of Donald Trump in New York in the 1970s. “It’s precisely this complexity that makes the film interesting to makebelieves the Iranian-Danish director. If the idea is that he was an asshole who becomes an even worse asshole, it’s not a movie, it’s hot air. (…) The reality is not that simple.”

Through this biopic, Ali Abassi is neither a mystification of Donald Trump nor a satire, but the story of the exceptional destiny of the former American president and presidential candidate, revealing the less grandiose side of his trajectory. A release date on the big screen that is not negligible, given that it takes place four weeks before the American elections. Available in cinemas in France from Wednesday 9 October 2024.

The “Zombis” exhibition opens at the Quai Branly museum this Tuesday, October 8, 2024. The goal is to return “to the sources”or the zombie in the voodoo religion in Haiti, and deconstruct the Hollywood myth, explains the curator of the exhibition and anthropologist Philippe Charlier. In this way the public is led to discover the Voodoo religion and its ritual objects.

Far from the representation of the zombie from Haiti, the figure of the zombie has become part of pop culture “a metaphor of contagious death that is very similar to the Central European vampire”analyzes Philippe Charlier. The zombie in pop culture, in cinema, and in Hollywood in particular, seems in fact more to embody the anxieties of an era and a society, than to pay homage to what constitutes its origin. This is what Perrine Quennesson, an expert on the figure of the zombie in cinema, explains live. Explain that the zombie embodies society’s fears as it evolves.

“The zombie body becomes a social body onto which we project our fears and anxieties.”

Perrine Quennesson

franceinfo

Without forgetting the comic potential of the zombie which, by making it ridiculous, becomes “a way to play with our fears”. This is the case of comedy. Dawn of the Dead by Edgar Wright made in 2004, which has just been restored and will be premiered at the Les Cinq Caumartin cinema in Paris, Thursday 10 October 2024. This will be followed by a conversation between our two speakers, Perrine Quennesson and Patrice Chavalier.

A program with the participation of Augustin Arrivé, Matteu Maestracci and Anne Chépeau, journalists from the culture department of franceinfo.