Born in 1966 in Beni Zid in Algeria, landed two years later in the city of Bosquets in Montfermeil, in Seine-Saint-Denis, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche appeared in French cinema in the early 2000s without asking permission, with a clear observation on the malaise of the suburbs (Wesh wesh, what’s going on?, 2001). Traveling camera, range of jazzman open to improvisations, combined powers of fiction and reality, certified independent and artisanal production, his unclassifiable cinema has, in twenty years, looked at France from every angle, from business life (Last maquis2008) until his smuggling epic (The Songs of Mandrin, 2012). His seventh feature film, The Temple Wood Gangreturns to the suburbs for a crime thriller involving an organized gang and a tale of a cursed hold-up, à la Jean-Pierre Melville.
The film opens with a landscape of France seen from the tower of a dormitory town…
The neighborhood scenes were shot in the city of Grand Parc in Bordeaux, protected by Unesco. There was a renovation campaign: they kept lawns, century-old trees. Above all, they did an incredible thing: take out the elevators on the exterior facade. Thus, each inhabitant, as he goes up to his house, sees his city expand, take on another amplitude, touch the sky. That’s what I wanted in this opening panorama: to move from the blocked horizon of the towers to the poetic dimension of the sky.
What made you want to go into genre cinema and shoot a thriller?
I grew up in a housing project, and when we met as kids in the morning, in the stairwell, we talked about the movie that had been shown on TV the night before, and it was often a gangster movie. I liked westerns, black films, especially when a group or an individual decided to change the course of their destiny. Certainly by committing a crime, but which was also an act of defiance. In The gang…, there is undoubtedly something left, but the characters who make the move are part of social relations: they are kids who come from the neighborhoods.
Where does this story of city friends robbing the convoy of a wealthy oil prince come from?
This is a news item, which occurred in 2014, that I had kept in my pocket for a long time. Guys from the city of Bois du Temple, in Clichy-sous-Bois (Seine-Seint-Denis), masked with a Gypsy from Val-d’Oise, robbed a Saudi prince’s van on the A1 motorway to crazy amounts of money. They had a contact who worked at a luxury car agency. Against all odds, it worked. Except that they were so happy that they started squandering the money haphazardly. And they got burned.
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