INTERVIEW
The film Petit pays , adaptation of the award-winning novel of the same name by Gaël Faye published by Éditions Grasset, is released in theaters on Friday August 28 in partnership with Europe 1. Its director Eric Barbier ( La promesse de l'Abe , 2017) confided to our microphone that the first screening of the film was complicated for its author.
Gaël Faye confronted with his story
The story begins in Burundi in the 90s, a country neighboring Rwanda. The hero is a child, Gabriel, with his father, played by Jean-Paule Rouve, his mother, played by Isabelle Kabano, and his little sister Dehlia. "The whole accomplishment of the scenario was to work around this family who will experience several shocks and upheavals: the separation of parents, the start of the civil war after the assassination of the President of Burundi, and through his mother, a refugee in Burundi, the start of the Rwandan genocide which begins on April 7, 1994 ", says the director.
These very complex events are seen through the eyes of a child, as in the book. A story very close to that of the author Gaël Faye. "The first screening was complicated for Gaël, because he measured the violence of his book," says Eric Barbier. According to him, it is possible to "go through the novel in a more poetic, more distant way" than in the film, thanks to the power of the novelist's writing. But during the premiere on the big screen (which took place in Kigali), "he found himself confronted with the violence of his history".
"Universal" history
The adaptation still takes up what makes "the strength of the book and, I hope, the strength of the film", says the director, namely to tell "great events in a very small family story". For Eric barbier, the "fact that the parents separate, with children who suffer from the separation of their father and their mother" makes this story a "universal story".
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If the teams were unable to shoot in Burundi due to the country's political instability, most of the scenes were shot in Rwanda. The castings were carried out in Belgium and France as well as in the Congo, Rwanda and by correspondence in Burundi.