A prophet

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Movie
German title A prophet
Original title Un prophète
Country of production France , Italy
original language French , Corsican
Publishing year 2009
length 150 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Jacques Audiard
script Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain , Abdel Raouf Dafri , Nicolas Peufaillit
production Martine Cassinelli
Marco Cherqui
Lauranne Bourrachot
Pascal Caucheteux
music Alexandre Desplat
camera Stéphane Fontaine
cut Juliette Welfling
occupation

Ein Prophet ( Un prophète ) is a feature film by the French director Jacques Audiard from 2009. The crime drama is about a young prison inmate of Arab origin who, with the help of the Corsican mafia, becomes an influential criminal. The film premiered in competition at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival and opened in French cinemas on August 26, 2009. The film opened in Switzerland on January 14th, in Germany on March 11th and in Austria on April 30th, 2010.

action

Single, 19-year-old Malik is sentenced to six years in prison. The Frenchman of Maghrebian descent ends up in a prison controlled by a Corsican mafia group led by César Luciani. The powerful Luciani manages to go about his business undisturbed by means of bribery, while his fellow Muslim inmates are hated by him. The mafia father forces the uneducated, irreligious boy off the street to kill an Arab fellow inmate named Reyeb. Reyeb advises him to use the time to get out of prison smarter. Malik tries to contact the prison authorities, betray Luciani and thus pull himself out of the affair, but he fails because of the corruption of the guards. After the Corsicans put him under violent pressure, he visits Reyeb in his cell and cuts his carotid artery with a razor blade. For Malik, the murder means an entry into a privileged life within the prison; Malik is increasingly protected by the Corsican mafia group and is assigned a more comfortable prison cell with a television. The Corsicans, who let him serve them, do not recognize him as one of their own. But like the other Corsicans, he is feared by the Arab prison inmates.

Over the next few months, Malik learns to adapt well. The illiterate person successfully takes part in a reading and writing course in prison and learns the Corsican language. When Luciani finds out about this, he orders Malik to secretly spy on his own people, who know nothing about the young Arab's progress. Luciani finally gets Malik released. While Malik is officially gaining work experience as an auto mechanic and the workshop is being paid for the lost work time, he is actually doing business for Luciani outside of prison. He learns from the prison drug dealer about a delivery that has been hidden at a rest stop. Together with his friend Ryad, whom he met in prison through reading classes and who was released early from prison due to cancer, he begins to organize drug deliveries. But in doing so, they penetrate into the area of ​​the drug dealer Latif. He then kidnaps Ryad. But Malik manages to get his friend Ryad free through the intimidation of a brother-in-law of Latif, who is also in prison.

Luciani learns that Malik wants to start his own business. Luciani then orders Malik to visit the Muslim Brahim Lattrache in Marseille. But Malik wants to shoot Malik in the car because he blames Luciani for the murder of Reyeb. Only because a deer jumps in front of the car at the right moment does Malik survive. Lattrache then calls Malik, who had previously had such a dream and was now able to warn the driver, a prophet. They agree to do more business. Malik is supposed to tell Luciani that a mole is betraying the Corsicans to the Italians. Luciani then gives Malik the job of removing the Corsican godfather in question. Malik and his now terminally ill friend Ryad shoot the bodyguards, but leave the godfather alive and betray the client. Thereupon a fight breaks out between the Corsican prisoners in the prison, while Malik is in solitary confinement because of too long exit time.

When he comes back from solitary confinement, he joins the Muslim side of the prison yard. When Luciani, who was left alone, comes to him, he is hit in the stomach by a Muslim prisoner. When Malik is released from prison, he is met by the wife and son of his friend Ryad, who has since died. They walk to the bus while a parade of his subordinates drives behind them.

History of origin

The plot is based on a story by Abdel Raouf Dafri. The French producer Marco Cherqui became aware of the script of the relatively unknown writer from northern France and immediately offered him a contract, even before the financing of the film was certain. Cherqui passed the story on to Jacques Audiard, who filmed it as his fifth directorial work. Filming began in early September 2008. Chic Films and Why Not Productions were responsible for production. The shooting was scheduled for 15 weeks. As venues, the city served mainly Gennevilliers north-west of Paris , Marseille and the departments of Var and Vaucluse . Audiard trusted in the actor Niels Arestrup , cameraman Stéphane Fontaine and film composer Alexandre Desplat , with whom he had already worked in 2005 on his previous film and César winner, The Wild Beat Of My Heart .

The relatively unknown 27-year-old actor Tahar Rahim , who starred in the television series La commune (2007), for which Abdel Raouf Dafri had written the scripts, was hired for the lead role. Audiard met Rahim on a trip together from another film set: "I saw him and that was it, although I didn't trust my instincts and had 40 other actors audition for the role before I picked him," says the director. "When I looked into his eyes, I saw no melancholy, no tragedy, just someone very sincere, [...] full of life," said Audiard.

The production costs are estimated at 12 million euros . Trying to be authentic, Audiard hired former prisoners who acted as advisors during the shooting of the film, and stated that the shooting had haunted him long after the end of the film. "I didn't recognize myself, I didn't recognize my voice, I looked like an obsessed madman, an African witch doctor," said Audiard. "I didn't want to let my kids see it."

reception

Niels Arestrup , Jacques Audiard and Tahar Rahim at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival

The film premiered on May 16, 2009 at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival , where Un prophète competed for the Palme d' Or. At the press conference for the film, Audiard stated that the interesting thing about the film was portraying the prison as a metaphor for society: “A person goes in, out, in, out. There is an analogy to society, inside - outside. After a certain amount of time it comes to the same thing, ” says Audiard. His film received high praise from the critics and, according to surveys of international film critics, was the favorite for the main prize of the film festival. Un prophète is also said to have been highly sought after by international distributors on the Cannes film market.

Jacques Mandelbaum ( Le Monde ) praised Tahar Rahim's acting performance as “breathtaking” and Un prophète as the director's best film so far, which the critic compared to Jacques Becker's prison film The Hole . The "rich, complex, sharp-tongued work that is under constant tension" is much more than a prison film. "It is also a revenge tale, an educational novel, a political allegory" . His colleague Gérard Leforet ( Liberation ) praised the “visionary” camera work by Stéphane Fontaine: “It is Kafka who holds the camera in the penal colony, where the sentences are carved into the epidermis of the convicted.”

The German trade press was just as enthusiastic. Like Mandelbaum, Hanns-Georg Rodek ( Die Welt ) was of the opinion that Un prophète was a genre work that transcended genre boundaries. "Un prophéte" is a lot at once and everything succeeds: a prison film, a sociogram, a race study, the story of the finding and cutting of the cord of an adoptive father - and, perversely, a success story, " said Rodek. Verena Lueken ( FAZ ) remarked the same and referred on the main character: “The whole thing has a considerable poetic part that has nothing to do with romanticism, but with Audiard's approach of telling a genre material with a complex, very unfamiliar central figure, sending her on an educational journey and providing her with fantasies, such as the genre does not actually provide for it. ” The Austrian daily Der Standard also took up the term “ educational trip ” , but criticized the metaphysical note of the film, “ which stylized the young Arab as a harbinger of a new age ” , as “ a little exaggerated ” . Katja Nicodemus ( time ) observed a "concentrated, extreme violence" in this year's competition and criticized that Audiard film, as well as the Filipino contribution Kinatay , "the attitude, the artistic filter for their bestiality" is missing.

Audiard's film was shown in French cinemas on August 26, 2009 and had 1.2 million visitors in the next few months. In mid-September 2009, Audiard's film was presented by the Center national de la cinématographie (CNC) as the official French contribution for the nomination for the best foreign language film at the 2010 Academy Awards . A seven-member jury led by Florence Malraux (President of the Commission d'avance sur recettes des CNC), Thierry Frémaux (Artistic Director of the Cannes Film Festival ), Alain Terzian (President of the Académie des Césars ) and the filmmakers Jeanne Moreau , Jean-Jacques Annaud , Constantin Costa-Gavras and Régis Wargnier are responsible.

In 2016, A Prophet ranked 85th in a BBC poll of the 100 most important films of the 21st century .

Awards

Un prophète received an invitation to compete at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009 , where Audiard competed for the Palme d'Or with his film, but was left behind against Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon . Un prophète was awarded the second most important prize of the film festival, the Grand Jury Prize. In the same year, the film was awarded in six categories for the European Film Awards (award for the best actor to Tahar Rahim) and at the London Film Festival . At the beginning of December 2009, Un prophète prevailed in the award of the US National Board of Review for Best Foreign Language Film against Germany's Oscar entry The White Ribbon and was awarded the Louis Delluc Prize and the Syndicat Français de la award in France Critique de Cinéma et des Films de Télévision ( Best French Film ) awarded. Another nomination for the Golden Globe and victory at the British BAFTA Awards followed. At the 30th London Critics' Circle Film Awards 2010 , Un prophète was named Best Film of 2009. At the 35th César Awards , Un prophète led the field of favorite films with 13 nominations and was awarded nine prizes in the categories of Best Film, Best Director, Leading, Young and Supporting Actors (Tahar Rahim and Niels Arestrup) .

At the 2010 Academy Awards , Audiard's film was nominated in the category of Best Foreign Language Film , but it fell behind the Argentine entry El secreto de sus ojos by Juan José Campanella .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. Christophe Carrière: Maux d'auteurs . In: L'Express , September 11, 2008, p. 106
  2. ↑ cf. Baron Bodissey: Audiard's Un Prophète Starts Shoot . In: Gates of Vienna News Feed, Sep 1, 2008 at 11:52 PM EST
  3. ↑ a b cf. Kenneth Turan: Jacques Audiard's 'A Prophet' has a buzz building in the Los Angeles Times, May 19, 2009 (accessed May 24, 2009 via calendarlive.com)
  4. ↑ cf. Article ( Memento of the original from May 22, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in Arte Kultur , May 16, 2009 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.arte.tv
  5. ↑ cf. "A Prophet" is a favorite in Cannes . In: EuroNews, May 24, 2009
  6. ↑ cf. Verena Lueken: All violence comes from the cinema on faz.net, May 24, 2009 (accessed June 10, 2009)
  7. ↑ cf. Jacques Mandelbaum: Jacques Audiard galvanize Cannes with the film "Un prophète" . In: Le Monde, May 19, 2009, Editorial - Analyzes, p. 1
  8. ↑ cf. Gérard Leforet: "Un prophète", taule froissée . In: Liberation, May 18, 2009, p. 26
  9. ↑ cf. Hanns-Georg Rodek: This year the genre film triumphs in Cannes at welt.de, May 18, 2009 (accessed May 24, 2009)
  10. ↑ cf. Verena Lueken: On the edges of the cinema at faz.net, May 18, 2009 (accessed May 24, 2009)
  11. ↑ cf. Dominik Kamalzadeh: The Antichrist as a silly number revue . In: Der Standard, May 19, 2009 (accessed May 24, 2009)
  12. ↑ cf. Katja Nicodemus : In the cutting room of the soul . In: Die Zeit, May 20, 2009, No. 22, p. 47
  13. ↑ cf. Le prix Louis-Delluc attribué à "Un prophète" at lemonde.fr, 11 December 2009 (accessed on 12 December 2009)
  14. ↑ a b cf. AFP : "Un prophète" retenu pour représenter la France aux Oscars at lemonde.fr, September 17, 2009 (accessed on September 18, 2009)
  15. ↑ cf. Prize winners ( Memento of the original from June 15, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at festival-cannes.fr (English; accessed May 24, 2009) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.festival-cannes.fr
  16. ↑ cf. "Up In The Air" Leads NBR Winners; “Precious” Snubbed at indiewire.com, December 3, 2009 (accessed December 4, 2009)