Each film by Philippe Faucon acts as an intimate rendezvous with history. Born in 1958, in Oujda (Morocco), the director of Sami (2000), The treason (2005), Disintegration (2011), Fatima (2015), amin (2018) took charge of the narrative of a postcolonial France confronted with its wanderings. At Faucon, who has been compared to Maurice Pialat, everything is said at low tension, with a constant sidelining of the spectacular, an obsession with precision. The Harkis, unveiled at the Directors’ Fortnight, in Cannes, renews the feat of a minimal, luminous gesture, and is released in theaters a year after Emmanuel Macron asked ” sorry “ to the Algerian auxiliaries (September 20, 2021), which the French State had abandoned to their fate, at the end of the Algerian war (1954-1962).
You were born in Morocco and spent your early years in Algeria. What are your memories of the war?
My father had joined the army in Morocco, where he met my mother. He was then sent to Algeria during the last months of the war, where he took care of the files for the return of conscripts. The fate of the harkis is a painful story, which I heard about as a child, even though my parents avoided the subject in front of us. I just knew that shameful things had happened, with people killed in numbers because they were considered traitors by other Algerians. This repressed history left bitter feelings.
“Les Harkis” draws a clear, refined line. How did you choose these few dates that punctuate the film and announce the tragedy?
The film is built on three periods: it opens in September 1959, when several characters join the French camp for different reasons – poverty, membership, or violence that has been suffered by the National Liberation Front [FLN]. It is also the moment when General de Gaulle, who came to power a year earlier, makes a speech in which we can hear that his policy can lead to self-determination and independence. The second time is in June 1960, when French emissaries met for the first time people from the FLN – which will be hidden from the harkis. Finally, the third part, in 1962, corresponds to the ceasefire, with the trap that closes on the characters.
What are you looking for in the economy of words and gestures?
Unlike literature, you can’t always describe in words what happens in the cinema, and that’s very interesting for writing. We then look for other possibilities, by working on the relationships between images, gazes, sequences of sequences. The physical presence of the actors, their cinematography, their expressiveness, counted a lot here. Their characters in a situation of stress, of tension, are evoked with few features, as during this sequence where the instructor (Omar Boulakirba) teaches his new recruits how to handle weapons.
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