Before the Brussels Attacks, Portents From a Film

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/30/movies/before-the-brussels-attacks-portents-froma-film.html

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PARIS — When the celebrated French director Philippe Faucon was seeking funding for his 2012 film, “La Désintégration,” or “The Disintegration,” about a group of frustrated young French Muslim men who attack the NATO headquarters in Brussels, he kept meeting resistance from investors.

“They told us, ‘It’s well written, but it’s largely a fantasy,’” Mr. Faucon said in an email over the weekend, referring to the French television companies that were reluctant to back the film. (He eventually received funding from Canal Plus and other backers.)

With each subsequent murderous attack — the ones last week in Brussels, the attacks in Paris last year, in January and November — the film seems ever more prescient. “Looking back on it, I realize today that we felt that ‘something’ was in the air, without being able to imagine the terrifying acceleration that would happen later,” Mr. Faucon said.

“When we were working on the screenplay, between 2008 and 2010, the project stirred up such discomfort and faced such rejection that we couldn’t imagine thinking up civilian targets in our fiction, ones that unfortunately became the case in reality.”

On the day of the Brussels attacks, Mr. Faucon was presenting his latest film, “Fatima” (2015), about the challenges facing first- and second-generation Muslim immigrants to France, to high school students in rural France. The next day, he showed them “La Désintégration.”

“They were disturbed,” he said, and asked his response to the Brussels attacks.

“I wasn’t able to analyze it yet and to respond beyond saying that I knew the places that had been hit — the Maelbeek metro station, the Zaventem airport — because I had been there during the writing and filming of the film, which tells of a similar attack that we chose to situate in another site in Brussels,” Mr. Faucon said.

“La Désintégration,” which was shown on French television for the first time this year, is about Ali (Rashid Debbouze), a young man in the outskirts of Lille, in northern France, who turns to jihad after struggling to find a job. Ali lives at home with his mother, a religious and peaceful Moroccan immigrant, and his sister. His older brother has left home and is about to marry a non-Muslim Frenchwoman, with his mother’s blessing.

Ali has a degree in mechanical systems maintenance but cannot find work. In one scene, he asks his sister if he should change anything in his résumé, and she tells him, “Your name.” Frustrated at a lack of possibilities, he falls under the sway of Djamel (Yassine Azzouz), an intense young Islamist who tells his recruits that “Liberty, equality, fraternity” is “only for whites.”

Mr. Faucon, who grew up in Morocco and Algeria, the son of a French soldier and an Algerian mother, is one of a handful of European filmmakers whose work has explored why some Muslim men in Europe turn to violent jihad. (A more recent French film about homegrown jihadists, “Made in France,” directed by Nicolas Boukhrief, went straight to video-on-demand in January after French theaters refused to show it, fearing for the safety of their employees after the January 2015 attacks.)

Mr. Faucon said that he believed the trend toward violence had as much to do with personal circumstance — “the dark and enigmatic parts of human beings” — as with social exclusion and murderous religious ideology. Other terrorist recruits internalize geopolitics. Some “assimilate the feeling of social exclusion (or sometimes personal failure),” he said, “that they might feel in the Western societies where they’re born.”

As happens in “La Désintégration,” recruiters for jihad can prey on those feelings, telling their recruits: “‘There are other Muslims like you who are suffering in the world. Reject this hypocrisy and this lie, join jihad,’” Mr. Faucon said. He added that he was struck by reports that after last year’s attacks in France, some high school students refused to stand for a minute of silence in honor of the victims, saying that they would do so only if the schools also did the same for Palestinian or Syrian victims.

Mr. Faucon’s “Fatima” tells the story of a Muslim woman in France who has not mastered French and cleans houses and hotels to help her teenage daughter study medicine. It won this year’s best-film César (the French equivalent of the Oscars), among other prizes, and is scheduled for release in the United States in August.

“When we presented ‘La Désintégration,’ we sometimes used this image: ‘A tree that falls makes more noise than a forest that grows,’” Mr. Faucon said. “With ‘Fatima,’ I thought now we need to tell the story of the forest that’s growing, this time by putting into the foreground the characters that were present in the background of ‘La Désintégration.’”