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BERLINALE 2022 Panorama

Thierry Demaizière and Alban Teurlai • Directors of Rookies

"The project is about looking for children who are failing academically in tricky neighbourhoods and bringing them together through hip-hop"

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- BERLINALE 2022: The French documentary makers lift the veil on an extraordinary educative mission attempting to break the spiral of social determinism

Thierry Demaizière and Alban Teurlai  • Directors of Rookies

Also the directors of films such as Rocco [+see also:
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interview: Thierry Demaizière, Alban T…
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]
(screened in Venice’s Giornate degli Autori in 2016) and Lourdes [+see also:
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]
(nominated for the Best Documentary César and Lumière in 2020), French filmmakers Thierry Demaizière and Alban Teurlai have this time immersed themselves in a Parisian high school’s hip hop club in order to give us Rookies [+see also:
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trailer
interview: Thierry Demaizière and Alba…
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, which opened the 72nd Berlinale’s Generation line-up.

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Cineuropa: How did you find out about Turgot High School’s hip hop division, and what made you want to make this film?
Alban Teurlai: It was Elsa Le Peutrec, who co-wrote the film, who picked up on a few lines in the press about the school and who told us about it. We immediately thought the story had film potential and we drilled down into the subject with a desire to use hip-hop to do something more socially engaged. Hip-hop is just an accessory, a backdrop we use in order to talk about education and the passing on of knowledge, and to paint a picture of these French kids.

What made you decide to focus on these eight main characters?
Thierry
Demaizière: We spent an entire school year in the high school, but the start-of-year interviews led by David, the hip hop teacher, provided us with nigh-on ideal casting sessions. We picked out the youngsters whom we were most interested in and decided to place special focus on the fifth formers because they’re at the end of their childhoods and the beginning of adulthood, and they told us some really surprising and shocking things. Because David’s project was about looking for children who were failing academically in tricky neighbourhoods and bringing them together through hip hop. So the decision was actually made for us. Then - and this is normal in the documentary process - we lost certain characters along the way, because their stories were sometimes identical to those told by other students, whereas the youngsters we’d “missed” at the beginning turned out to be very strong characters, especially Nathanaël who served as our “dropout”.

The film doesn’t look to be positive at all costs; it exposes the successes but also the difficulties certain students have in overcoming their family and social experiences.
T.D.: That’s the big difference between this and fiction. We’re always guided by reality; we film what we see and what’s taking place. From the word go, we realised, for example, that Charlotte was on the verge of giving up school. And it would be a miracle if, all of a sudden, thanks to one hip hop lesson, these youngsters who were failing academically became top of their class. It’s been a bit of a slog, but the outcome over the past three years is that they all passed their Baccalauréat, apart from two of them. Even if some of them have had to repeat a year en route, ultimately, they’ve progressed.

Little by little, the film reveals these youngsters’ many different outlooks on the world in which they’re living.
T.D.:
We picked up on these outlooks during their conversations at breaktimes, when they were mucking around together, etc. We also wanted the film to be the portrait of an entire generation and to use dance to explore their attitude towards money, success, a little bit about sexuality, the boy/girl divide, and even the culture of hip hop and battles: the attitudes involved, earning respect… These modern kids also talk about tomorrow’s world, which makes me feel optimistic because they’re cool and full of good will.

A.T.: We wanted the film to do justice to these teens and they’re the only ones who express themselves. The teachers and those surrounding the pupils are present and play a part in the film, but it’s the young people we lend a voice to.

You take a highly immersive filming approach when it comes to the dance scenes.
T.D.: We’ve been lucky enough to have filmed a lot of dance in our time: Reset [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
at the Paris Opéra, featuring classical dancers, the Netflix series Move featuring five very difference dances (from flamenco through to street dance). So we’re starting to learn where to position the cameras.

A.T.: When you film dancing, logic dictates a wide, static shot which relays the movements of bodies through space and time. But, very soon, I came closer and entered into the circle - even if it meant getting knocked into and the camera getting messed up a bit - in order to convey more of a subjective viewpoint.

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(Translated from French)

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