“It Is Up to Us to Work on Our Own Complexes”: An Interview with Alice Diop

Abstract

“It Is Up to Us to Work on Our Own Complexes”: An Interview with Alice Diop Olivier Barlet Translated by Beti Ellerson Born in France into a Senegalese family, Alice Diop studied the relationship between cinema and society before venturing into documentary filmmaking: La Tour du monde / The World’s Tower (2006), a portrait of immigrant families, offers a different view of a neighborhood north of Paris where she grew up. Clichy pour l’exemple / Clichy as Example (2006) seeks to find the reasons for the rage that surfaced in the housing projects in 2005; Les Sénégalaises et la Sénégauloise / The Senegalese and Senegauloise (2007) deals with the women in her Dakarois family. La mort de Danton / Danton’s Death (2011), shows both the courageous journey and the doubts of Steve, a tall Black man of a Seine St. Denis housing project, after three years of acting classes in Paris. Olivier Barlet: Danton’s Death has been selected in many festivals and has won awards, notably the Prix des bibliothèques [Library Prize] at the prestigious Cinéma du Réel. What do you attribute to its success? Alice Diop: In all modesty, I think it’s a bit of an overstatement to speak of success. But yes, I was delighted about the reception of the film, especially the award at the Cinéma du Réel, which came very soon after the editing was completed. I think that many people identify with Steve’s journey, his thirst for independence, his desire to make a life for himself and to dare to imagine a possibility beyond the destiny assigned to him. I remember an older woman who came to me after a screening and said with tears in her eyes, “Steve is me.” I was extremely touched. She was white, she was from Picardy, and she recognized in him her own complex of illegitimacy. I am very happy that this film can speak to everyone. That so many people could relate to Steve’s [End Page 218] character was very important to me. I think this film can extend beyond the subject of discrimination against Black actors in France and prejudices that affect young people from housing projects. OB: How did you meet Steve Tientcheu? AD: We grew up in the same housing project, the 3000, in Aulnay-sous-Bois, but then I left the neighborhood and only saw him again later at a wedding. I thought that he had conformed to what I imagined one would become, having grown up in the housing projects, but he said he was taking acting lessons at the Cours Simon. I was shocked: I realized that I was projecting the same prejudices on him that I was condemning in others! I asked him if I could attend a rehearsal, and while there, I perceived a great violence in the place that was accorded him, the manner in which others viewed him. That is when I suggested to him to make a film. OB: Danton’s Death carries this title because you give Steve the opportunity to interpret, alone and in the street, the role that he dreams of but that he is denied on the stage because he is Black. Was this the main theme of the film? AD: It was I who asked Steve to interpret this scene, I pushed him to interpret the role of Danton. 1 It was a way of saying “do not expect others to legitimize what you want to be.” As I said earlier, I think this film deals with more than questions about the place given to Black actors in France. For me the reality is actually indicative of something much larger. The subject of my film is rather about how to escape from the confinement of the gaze of the Other—how to invent one’s own life and become the person of one’s choice, despite what others project on us, despite the place and role they assign to us. Of course with someone like Steve, a kind of a walking caricature of all the clichés that people can have about the youth of housing projects, this question takes...