Anyone who was at the Marrakech du rire gala on June 4, 2016 will tell you: Ahmed Sylla, with his enchanting smile à la Omar Sy and his unbridled gestures à la Jim Carrey, was the discovery of the evening. The approximately two thousand spectators of the El Badi palace, central place of the festival organized each year by Jamel Debbouze, offered a memorable standing ovation to this showman in the making. We were there and shared the same enthusiasm for the hilarious impersonations and benevolent humor of this tall young man born in France to Senegalese parents.
“I arrived on stage with a cyclone in my stomach, I was so nervous, I came out with tears in my eyes”, remembers the comedian. These twelve minutes of sketch, broadcast on television and viral on social networks, changed his life. Since then, Ahmed Sylla has become a face of cinema on the way to occupying all registers. After several expected roles in comedies (The Ascension, Twins but not too manyetc.), we discover him this winter as a Senegalese rifleman in The Lulus War, of Yann Samuell, and as the son of an Ivorian emigrant in A little brother, by Léonor Serraille, currently in theaters. On February 24, he will be one of nine masters of ceremonies for the 48e edition of the Césars, live from the Olympia.
Seated at the bar of a chic 16th century hotele district of Paris, Ahmed Sylla, 32, enjoys his breakfast and his unexpected itinerary there. “Everything that happens to me is, every time, the icing on the cake. I still consider myself a child in the trade, I grow with each project, my eyes lit up. I never thought I would climb the steps of the Cannes Film Festival for an auteur film like A little brother. »
These new roles against employment resonate with his family history. His mother, like the character of Rose, wonderfully interpreted by Annabelle Lengronne, has always been “a fighter, free woman, who wanted the best for her children”. His grandfather, like Moussa in The Lulus War, was a Senegalese skirmisher. In his first show, Ahmed Sylla with a capital Ahe had paid him a fine tribute. “Your weapon is your mouth. Speak about me so that I will not be forgotten, said the old man to his grandson.
Ahmed Sylla, second of four siblings, grew up in the popular city – “very enclosed”, he specifies – from Dervallières, to Nantes. His parents were market vendors. His father would have dreamed of being a nurse, his mother never stopped struggling, opening a shop selling exotic products, then a small restaurant. “I never saw her rest”, insists his son. Under maternal pressure, all of his schooling (like that of his brothers and sisters) took place outside his neighborhood, in private Catholic establishments where he was the only black in his class.
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