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FILMS France

Do It Right: caught between two worlds

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- Chad Chenouga brings us an accurate and moving film about the rites of passage that a young boy, played by revelation Khaled Alouach, must go through when he is put into care

Do It Right: caught between two worlds
Khaled Alouach and Jisca Kalvanda in Do It Right

It is a heavy burden that suddenly comes crashing down onto the shoulders of 16-year-old Nassim, a high school student in the well-to-do Parisian suburbs, when he comes home from a weekend in the countryside with his friends to find his mother dead in their small apartment. This drama, which quite frankly doesn’t come as much of a surprise, as the woman was so heavily addicted to drugs she could no longer tell the days apart, rips apart a closely-knit relationship in a single-parent family in which an only son took care of his mother single-handedly, all the while trying to live his teenage life, to the point of choosing not to reply to his mother’s last telephone call. 

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And so Nassim (played by revelation Khaled Alouach) is left by himself, with his guilt and his mother’s last words left on his voicemail. This is basically the point of departure for Chad Chenouga’s new film, Do It Right [+see also:
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, which was released in France today by Ad Vitam, marking the successful return to the big screen of a filmmaker who was discovered at Locarno in 2001 with Mes Fantômes and has this time adapted (with Christine Paillard)his own play, which was in turn inspired by events from his personal life. This autobiographical vein gives the film moving accuracy whilst never sliding into melodrama, with the portrait of a young boy searching for his place in society.  As Nassim, who is rejected by his mother’s family, is placed into a department of social services foster home in the Parisian suburbs, a world whose tensions and intimidations he gradually discovers, a world he initially refuses to belong to ("I have nothing to do with the others"), whilst lying at school about his situation, pretending that he’s been taken in my his uncle. 

And so he begins a complicated double life fuelled by the fear of being exposed, making a future for himself obscured by the threat of having to change schools at the end of the year. An existence caught between two worlds in which he is haunted by the memory of his mother, which causes Nassim to slowly but surely open up to the other foster kids (played by Laurent Xu, Daouda Keita, Aboudou Sacko and Jisca Kalvanda most notably), to their energy and hidden wounds (inventoried in inaccessible files: "it’s like a tattoo, it follows you everywhere"). A rite of passage in overcoming loneliness and bitterness in the face of a cruel fate, supported by the kindly foster home director (Yolande Moreau) and traversed by the discovery of love in different forms.

A sensitive and genuine film, Do It Right manages to take possession of reality without caricaturing it or feigning documentary. A subtle piece of fiction which only further highlights the social problems it broaches, along with the merits of its director and very accomplished actors.

Produced by Miléna Poylo and Gilles Sacuto for TS Productions, Do It Right is being sold internationally by Films Distribution.

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(Translated from French)

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