Born in Sèvres (Hauts-de-Seine) forty-one years ago to an Ivorian father, now deceased, and a Guyanese mother, raised in Cergy (Val-d’Oise), Steve Achiepo is a model of navigation without a map or GPS, but with a temperament, a curiosity, a binder that breaks down the walls of the social labyrinth. The unique journey – let’s say pure self-taught – which leads him today to his first feature film, the remarkable Sand seller, testifies to this. He has “always done on the nerve”, to put it in his own words. It all starts after graduation, with the extreme liberality of a single mother at home and the rapid abandonment of her law studies: “It did not suit me to find myself in an amphitheater. Everything I learned at school, I learned it by talking to the teachers, I never reviewed anything. »
It is a formula that he therefore decides to cultivate. After a few months of hesitation, feeling the time had come to “to do something [sa] life “, he takes the example of his brother, a computer scientist, and presents himself to Pôle emploi. The dialogue, if not literally, at least in spirit: “Hello, I would like to be a computer scientist / Hello, it’s blocked / So what’s not blocked? / Real estate / OK, no problem, I’ll do that. » And there he goes. Steve Achiepo knows absolutely no one in Paris, has no contact, no recommendation, no training, he hardly knows the city better, moreover: ” The fields[-Elysées] and Châtelet, nothing else. »
So here he is knocking, haphazardly, on the door of the capital’s shops, presenting himself in this way: “Hello, I am looking for a job. » Thrown as it is on paper, the performance cannot be explained, it lacks the essential: the meter ninety, the smile, the alertness, the good vibrations. In a word, ease, which is given only to few among us, of whatever extraction or color.
Sens of observation
The sequel looks like a self-made-man movie. He gets a job as a real estate agent in the 16e arrondissement, enrolls at the same time in an evening theater class, is informed there of the existence of a school called La Fémis, where young students make their study films, goes there with a few photos under his arm, offers himself for castings, sympathizes with quite a few of them, who will become his future technicians, even his future producer, finally goes on to direct short films himself, by searching on the site from the National Center for Cinema and the Moving Image of the names of festivals and production companies and by obtaining technical tools from Fémis. This is how the first student of the Fémis who made him shoot as an actor in 2008 in her short film becomes, in 2022, the editor of her first feature film as a director.
You have 47.05% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.