After directing the incredibly successful DJ Snake “Disco Maghreb” music video, French-Algerian director Elias Belkeddar treats us to a Midnight Screening of his first feature film Omar la Fraise (The King of Algiers), shot in Algeria and starring French partners in crime Benoît Magimel and Reda Kateb on the run. We meet the director to discuss a film that unfolds like a romance.
The spark of an idea
Initially, the idea was to film and showcase my Algeria, through the lens of how I experienced and live it now, from a perspective I hadn’t yet seen on screen. This is a place so rich, with so incredible an aesthetic, so extraordinary a people, that I wanted to pay tribute to it and share a little of the tenderness I feel for the country and its culture.
I wanted to shoot in Algeria, and my best friend Yacine Medkour is a producer there. He’s my age and fights tooth and nail to bring projects to life. As I spent time over there, one image kept coming back to me: French thugs on the run in Algeria. In France, Algerians across the country are often seen as a problem, and I thought it would be interesting to flip the script and look at French people in Algeria. It struck me as a contemporary story I could tell from a fresh angle, without getting bogged down in negativity. This approach goes beyond social commentary: it’s entertaining and looks at history and the power of image, too. It’s also a good vehicle for shedding light onto the country, as the characters are “newcomers”.
“This approach goes beyond social commentary: it’s entertaining and looks at history and the power of image, too.”
Locations
We shot some scenes in Ouargla in the Sahara, and we did a lot of filming in Algiers’ working-class districts, two in particular: Bab el Oued and Climat de France, which is a sprawling former French military barracks compound designed by architect Pouillon. These sites hadn’t been given much air-time before: they hint at another Algeria, marked by the traces and scars of the past. We met some extraordinary people who opened their doors to our film crew for the first time in their lives. It took forty-odd days to shoot.
The film
This film is a love story: a bromance between two men, and a romance between a man and a woman. The image of a thug is a genre trope, more a narrative vehicle than an authentic subject. The real protagonist here is love and exile. Why Omar la Fraise (The King of Algiers)? Gangsters have names like that, aliases: Dédé the Elegant, you get the idea. I always find them so poetic. I built a legend up around this figure of the King, a myth that unfurls over the course of the film to reveal the truth behind the initial mask.
Casting
I admire Benoit Magimel and Reda Kateb enormously. Both actors said yes within 24 hours, which was amazing. As for Meriem Amiar, she’s a young actor from Oran and is quite famous in Algeria.
