Toronto: Ladj Ly returns to the outskirts of Paris to tackle injustice in ‘Les Indesirables’

French filmmaker Ladj Ly could hardly have hoped for greater success with his 2019 feature debut. Les MiserableS. Born and raised in the immigrant neighborhoods of Paris – known as the banlieues – Ly, now 43, has documented the daily hardships and injustices his community has faced since he was a teenager. Les Miserables put that project in the spotlight worldwide. The film, which deploys the crime thriller genre to deeply portray the brutal cycles of police violence against Black and Arab youth in Paris, won the Jury Prize at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival; four César Awards, including best film; and was nominated for an Oscar in the best international film category. Perhaps more importantly for the issues Ly cares about, French President Emmanuel Macron told local press that he was “upset by the accuracy” of the film and that he would order his government to “rush to find ideas and to take action to improve living conditions around the world’. the banlieues.”

But such professed goals have not been realized – far from it.

On June 27, Nahel Merzouk, a French 17-year-old of Moroccan and Algerian descent, was shot and killed at close range during a traffic stop by a Parisian police officer in the banlieues. The incident – ​​combined with police officers’ early attempts to distort the facts of the deadly encounter before video evidence refuted their claims and exposed that a murder had occurred – became a symbolic moment, sparking weeks of protests and civil unrest across France. .

“President Macron saw my film and said he was very moved and promised to find a solution for the banlieues throughout France,” says Ly. The Hollywood Reporter. “But the only solution he seems to have found is to allow the police to kill black and Arab people. The last case was the Nahel case, but there are so many – and our politicians don’t seem intent on finding a better solution.”

He continues: “Now they are talking about moving and displacing so many families in the projects, and they are doing it in a very brutal way.”

Ly acknowledges that the surprising reach and impact of his first feature made the process of developing a follow-up film somewhat daunting.

“It is true that after the success of Les Miserables, it was very, very difficult,” he explains. “We did not expect that success. We thought this was a story that wasn’t interesting to many people – and we never dreamed it would have such an impact on such a large audience. That made the choice of a second film a very difficult challenge for us, because we were stuck on what story to tell that could be as strong as what we were trying to do with it. Les Miserables.”

Ultimately, it was the endless political paralysis and the pattern of violence in French policy towards the banlieues that provided the answer.

“The residents of those neighborhoods are humiliated every day, and that is the worst of all,” says Ly. “The violence of the police is humiliating. It is humiliating to experience being completely robbed of your home. My parents’ generation, which came from Africa, was humiliated; and I was born in France and I am 100 percent French, but we continue to experience constant humiliation in this country of our home. We are treated like a different class of French people. This is the real reason why people are outraged.”

Ly’s second feature film, Les Indesirables, was already underway before the unrest exploded in June, but it was a response to the political situation that set the stage for those events – and so many less visible events like these in France. The new film, which premiered September 8 in competition at the Toronto International Film Festival, centers on a young white doctor (Alexis Manenti) who is appointed mayor of a working-class neighborhood in Paris, and a young woman of color ( Anta Diaw). Living in a tower block of the Banlieues, he becomes an activist for ‘the unwanted’, who are about to be forcibly relocated due to the new mayor’s plans to gentrify the community. Manenti is the same actor who played the most racist cop Les Miserables – a metatextual statement about how “racism is spread through all political institutions and branches of French society,” says Ly.

“The reason I made Les Indesirables and the reason I am going to make my next film is to continue to expose this situation of inaction of politicians,” he explains.

Toronto organizers have described the film as “a timely story of revolution,” but Ly is optimistic about the limitations of cinema in bringing about change in the real world.

“I am an artist and my job is just to expose the unjust reality as I see it,” he says. “I have no solutions. I hope the film will expose the humiliating situations people face every day and help more people understand the situation – and why so many of us feel this anger.”

He adds: “These cycles have been going on in our society my entire life. Macron and the other politicians have the real political power – not the artists – and if they really had the will to break this cycle, they could take actions that would help make this happen immediately.”

This story first appeared in the September 6 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.