In "Djellaba Basket", Philippe Pujol films the integrated Islam of Marseille

Djellaba Basket, a film by Philippe Pujol -

• In “Djellaba Basket”, co-directed by Philippe Pujol, young Muslims from Marseille and imams each deliver their vision of Islam.

• The aim is not to make a film on religion but on Islam as a social phenomenon through the djellaba-basket generation.

• The director assumes the bias, which he recognizes as radical, of not giving a voice to any Muslim woman.

They punctuate their sentences with a "wallah".

They talk at all costs about what is "haram" or "hallal", prohibited or authorized by Islam.

"They have the bruise on their foreheads because they pray and the joint in their hand", also writes of them Philippe Pujol in

, a dive into the northern districts of Marseille which already evoked these young people in "djellabas- sneakers ”, as he put it.

The author-director has this time decided to devote a documentary to them, co-produced with Jean-Christophe Gaudry and broadcast on October 26 on France 3 Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur, under the title

.

To music by Imhotep, the film attacks with a few steps of break dancing before passing successively to young Muslims, to Imam Ismaël of the Bleuets mosque, one of the most listened to in Marseille who delivers on Facebook many “SOS Islam” style advice, to the imam of an inclusive mosque that fights the taboo of homosexuality in religion, to the head of a confessional college and high school.

And also to Nassurdine Haïdari, former elected socialist and former imam who recounts, with the correctness of tone that characterizes him, his past as a repentant Salafist.

Almost all of them are from the young generation, the one that was a teenager in the 1990s. They tell of an Islam far from obscurantism and anchored in an urban culture.

The invisible voice of women

No specialist in religion, and even less media personalities: "This is not a film on Islam as a religion but on Islam in our working-class neighborhoods as a social phenomenon," insists Philippe Pujol.

One absence is striking, however: the total absence of words from women or about women.

A way of making them invisible which disturbs in a film which precisely sets out to show the “diversity” of Islam, at least in Marseille.

This radical choice is fully assumed by Philippe Pujol: "The veil hysterizes the debate, the subject would have swallowed up everything else, that would deserve entire films," he pleads.

The subject of the film is youth and Islam ”.

"With secularism, these are the two absent subjects, but I did not want to explain this bias, I prefer the confusion that it leaves than being too didactic", he adds.

Basically, Philippe Pujol comes back to what he knows well, the description of a system and the criticism of the abandonment of working-class neighborhoods.

"Between the dealer and the Salafist, the first to preach them wins," he said.

But no more than the young people of Marseille in these neighborhoods boil down to delinquency, their “approximate Islam” does not radicalize them, according to Pujol: “For me, in Marseille, radical Islam does not take hold.

There are islets but generally they have a short lifespan, although this requires great vigilance.

"

“The strong feeling of belonging to this city means that things may be going better than elsewhere”, also sketches Jean-Christophe Gaudry.

The Imam of the Bleuets recognizes this himself, the first identity he received from his father, "is to be Marseille, it is pétanque, ball, music".

The “need to pray” came to him next.

In his mosque, he performs the ritual washing of victims of settling scores.

Another Marseille reality.

Media

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Miscellaneous

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• Culture

• Marseilles

• Youth

• Documentary

• Islam