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Red-painted wooden pallets stacked high in a loading bay, somewhere in France. A man in a forklift truck picks up half a dozen, moves them elsewhere. Repeats the action. In the opening scene of Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s third feature, Dernier Maquis (2008), we watch as the landscape changes, like squares shifting in a geometric design, framed by an austere camera. The soundtrack—a saxophone and, more prominent in the mix, the crash of the pallets—has been with us from the black screen of the title credits. Is this a film? Is it the movie set being created? It is both. In his seven features dating back to the early 2000s, the 58-year-old Franco-Algerian director has consistently started from a concrete location, which is studied with the precision of an anthropologist. But while there may be neo-realist elements, this is by no means cinéma direct. Ameur-Zaïmeche’s scenes are carefully constructed—he painted all those pallets red—and as the camera rolls, the director himself is often among the group of characters before it. Then, what he likes to call the smuggling process of his cinema begins: criss-crossing the borders between formalism and improvisation, fiction and verité.
French Maghrebians—and French Africans—have made a notable impact on contemporary French audio-visual culture, both in front of the camera and behind it. Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine, achieving blockbuster success at the very moment of the 1995 rupture sociale of strikes and protests, endowed the banlieue movie with new status. Abdellatif Kechiche’s L’Esquive (2004) and La Graine et le mulet (2007), Rachid Bouchareb’s Indigènes (2006) and Hors la loi (2010), Karim Dridi’s Khamsa (2008) and Roschdy Zem’s Omar m’a tuer (2011) were among a new wave of works by second- and third-generation descendants of Maghrebian migrants that gained a mainstream audience, often bringing a politically charged focus to their experience of growing up in France; and matched by a comparable surge in fiction writing.footnote1
Formally and thematically, however, Ameur-Zaïmeche’s cinema is quite distinct from most of this work—more experimental, more radical and largely made outside the commercial film industry. Since his first feature, Wesh wesh, qu’est-ce qui se passe? (2001), shot on his home turf of Seine-Saint-Denis, his work has been broadly praised in France—he is barely distributed abroad—without receiving much serious critical attention.footnote2 His first two features were modestly successful, but he was never attracted by the typical trajectory of a careerist filmmaker. When he might have moved up a gear in financial terms after the relative success of his first two films, he stepped sideways and made two historical features on shoestring budgets. Much like the figure of Louis Mandrin, the 18th-century bandit who inspired the first of these, Ameur-Zaïmeche has not only shot like a smuggler but also operated like one, stealing a march on an industry that is stacked against characters like him, outsiders without film-school diplomas and uninterested in conforming to the label he could so easily have adopted as a director of gritty action movies about banlieue life, following the codes set in place by La Haine and updated by Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables (2019). Reflective and engaged, his oeuvre might be read as an antidote to that genre.
Ameur-Zaïmeche was born in 1966 in the district of Beni Zid, on the eastern edge of the Kabylia region, in northeast Algeria. His family owned land that was expropriated by the post-Independence regime. At the age of two, he moved with his parents and siblings—he is from a family of ten—to France. While many Algerian migrants were sent to sprawling makeshift camps, Ameur-Zaïmeche’s family was housed in one of the new developments in the Parisian banlieue. Zaïmeche grew up in the cité des Bosquets, a vast housing estate in Montfermeil, Seine-Saint-Denis. His father went into the trucking business, eventually building up a fleet of 600 lorries; young Rabah was known locally as the boss’s son.footnote3 His childhood, he has often said in interviews, was a happy one; within the estate there was a strong sense of community and solidarity, though the aggressive presence of the police was everywhere:
Our political awakening took place on the front steps [of the apartment blocks]. We needed vigilance, always being on the lookout, aware of how others were trying to portray or deconstruct us. There was always this fierce desire to retain our dignity, even if it meant becoming delinquents. We preferred being bandits to being fools.footnote4
Nearby was the Forest of Bondy, where he and his friends could escape to go fishing. At night they would take to the rooftop of the apartment block: ‘It was magnificent! We could see all the lights, we thought we were on a floating ship.’footnote5 From such a vantage point, he began to compose frames. So too on the daily rides in the family car: ‘Every day, when we drove through the estate there were these tracking shots, that came back each time . . . looking out the car window, I was already thinking of the camera, of film images.’footnote6 They were nourished by a varied diet: John Ford Westerns, Murnau’s melodrama, horror movies hired from the local video-store by his big brother; the tv cinéclub. Ameur-Zaïmeche passed his baccalauréat, but the classic path to becoming a cinéaste in France—applying to idhec, now La Fémis, the leading film school—didn’t attract him: ‘All it needed was for me to fail the entrance exam and I’d have been filled with frustration and disappointment afterwards; it could have imperilled my childhood dream.’footnote7
Instead, he studied first psychology, then social anthropology at the University Paris V René Descartes, teaching himself how to use a camera and reading film theory in his spare time—getting into Eisenstein à donf as he puts it.footnote8 Instead of the final-year paper he was supposed to produce on ethnic minorities and territorial issues, he and a student friend decided to write a screenplay, the basis for Wesh wesh, qu’est-ce qui se passe?, on which he started work in 1999. The title, roughly ‘What’s up, what’s up?’ in Arabo-French, won the approval of his young son. The film was largely self-funded. Ameur-Zaïmeche sold his shares in his father’s trucking business to set up his own company, Sarrazink Productions, which has been behind all his subsequent films.footnote9 He recruited friends and relations to serve as the cast, and took the role of Kamel, the main protagonist, himself. His figure, tall and rangy, has become a signature motif of his oeuvre.