“Libé” returns to meet the French who made the news in our columns to discuss the presidential election. Today, Jean-Philippe Grosset, director of the first feature film in Creole, “Zamal Paradise”.
Two months ago, Jean-Philippe Grosset had accepted the meeting, at home, with lip service. It was the first time, justified the filmmaker, that he accepted a journalist in his “hut”, in the mountainous heights of Saint-Denis de La Réunion, “among the salads“. The director, who had just come out Zamal Paradisea 2.5-hour feature film in Creole, took part in the photo game only after putting on a hat and dark glasses.
For these more political reunions, the filmmaker from Reunion this time asked that the interview take place, not at the headquarters of his production company… but at our home. A disturbing condition – but finally, a journalist is not going to receive his interlocutors at home! – and which, ultimately, seems consistent with the career of the former rapper: DKpit (his stage name) wanted “being equal”.
“I was quickly made to understand that I was a black sheep”
Agreement was therefore given but the forties still hesitated. His ideas, he slips them neither into the ballot box nor into the pages of the media, but into his films. “I am apoliticalalmost apologizes DKpit. I have never voted in my life.” The director, who nevertheless claims to be committed, justifies himself: “When I was younger, I saw the chosen ones as shepherds who were supposed to lead the flock of sheep to green pastures. Then I realized that the shepherds were subjugated to the wolves of finance. The sheep does not know that the grass it browses does not belong to the shepherd, but to the wolf. If it is indeed the shepherd who mows it and leaves in 4×4, the sale of the wool still benefits the wolf, who has a Ferrari.
In verve, the former rapper gets up and continues to spin the ovine metaphor: “Me, I was quickly made to understand that I was a black sheep. The shepherd’s dogs – the institutions – accused me of not doing mèèhhhhh like the others. I don’t judge the sheep, they want to believe the shepherd who promises them to change the world. But I didn’t want people to tell me stories, I wanted to write my own! In the end, DKpit, who is not afraid of emphasis and does not bother with false modesty, describes himself as “a winged dragon, who watches the herd from afar.” In short, a “artist” who is reluctant to cite the name of only one of the candidates for the Elysée.
The previous episode of the series “Their say”
Abstainer, yes. But his journey, his film… He who, as a teenager, dealt “zamal” (the local weed), robbed shops, and even “almost killed a guy”. He who stages “kaniar la kour” (street delinquents), he whose father gave and received blows to defend the emancipatory ideas of the Reunionese Communist Party, how can he remain indifferent to a presidential election? How not to denounce inequalities? Jean-Philippe Grosset bursts out laughing: “Stop the hypocrisy! I know the suffering that capitalism causes, I know the frustrations caused by the iPhones that we shove in the mouths of young people by telling them, it’s not for you, too expensive! But I also know that I have to accept, without sharing them, the rules of the game, if only to finance my next film…”
“The galley engenders the work”
So DKpit shows more than it accuses, recalling however: “Have you ever seen a French film which unfolds over 2:30 the galley of young people of color?” No, and we have to admit that Zamal Paradise, soon on streaming platforms, had the effect of an electric shock in Reunion. When he presented it at Fespaco, Africa’s biggest film festival held in Burkina Faso, the director chatted with a street vendor, who told him: “When there is no solution, there are no problems!” Jean-Philippe sees in this formula a metaphor for his commitment: “Let’s stop asking artists to be sociologists or neighborhood mediators! Let us share our vision of the world, it’s already not bad!”
DKpit is also fine-tuning its next scenario, “the most rock’n’roll rap story in France”, he promises. Nothing less. Its hero will discover that the original paradise has turned into “baisodrome, where everyone has to fuck the other to succeed…” This bipolar, even simplistic vision, the Reunionese accepts it more than he fights it: “The artistic challenge is inseparable from the cleavage, the galley generates the work.” And to quote Tarkovski, the Russian director confronted with Soviet censorship who won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1986 for the sacrifice. A not insignificant example for the filmmaker from Reunion, who, agitated, makes the skull drawn on his T-shirt tremble.