ReportingThe inhabitants of Kawéni attended, on Friday February 4, the screening of the film by Manuel Schapira, adapted from the novel by Nathacha Appanah. This brutal portrait of their daily life in the poorest department of France is the first feature film shot on the archipelago.
Friday, February 4, 6:30 p.m. The day is falling on the hills of Kawéni. The screeching of the grinders and the tempo of the hammer blows of the boilermakers, these open-air “workshops” where scrap metals are melted to make the utensils of daily life, have died down. Fruit bats spread their wings in the sky of the largest slum in France, where more than 15,000 people, most of Comorian origin and without papers, live under house arrest in these sheet metal barracks – the bangas – which pile up along the slopes strewn with rubbish.
We are in Mayotte, “the poorest and youngest department in France”, as mentioned in the preamble Tropic of violence, screened that evening near Kawéni. The film is adapted from the novel by Nathacha Appanah, published in 2016 by Gallimard editions. Both cruel and dreamlike, the book is anchored in this dislocated and ultra-violent universe, through the fate of a band of teenagers left to their own devices, living on plunder and crimes, self-destructing with alcohol. and “chemicals”, a drug that is wreaking havoc in this archipelago in the Indian Ocean acquired by France in 1841 and became a department in 2011. A fiction so close to reality.
It was the writer Delphine de Vigan, with whom he had already worked, who recommended the book to Manuel Schapira, director of numerous short films. He then ignores everything about Mayotte. “I’m reading the book and I can’t believe it’s set in France,” he says. His first stay in Mayotte is a shock: “This place is sadly crazy. I wondered how it was possible that so little was known about this situation. » Making a film there, when there is no infrastructure or aid, everything is overpriced and insecurity reigns, will turn out to be a crazy adventure. Because for Manuel Schapira, it was unthinkable to shoot elsewhere than in Mayotte.
The Magic of System D
Most scenes from Tropic of Violence were filmed in the very heart of the Kawéni slum, nicknamed “Gaza”, near Mamoudzou, the capital of the department. With actors who, for almost all of them, have been spotted and cast on the spot. People living in destitution and whose life paths were, for some, not so far removed from the role they had to embody. It is also the first time that a feature film has been made there.
It was just as obvious for Manuel Schapira, as for its producer, Carole Lambert, and its distributor, Mathieu Robinet, that it was in Mayotte, for the Mayotte public, that the film should first be presented. Originally, a large-scale outdoor screening was to allow the inhabitants of Kawéni, who had often provided security during filming and appeared in certain shots, to attend this preview. But logistical and administrative problems came to thwart this project. Thursday, February 3, back in the slum, Manuel Schapira could not however bring himself to default on these people who had welcomed him and trusted him, even if it meant opting for a less ambitious format than expected.
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