Paris (AFP)

After the multi-written novel by Franco-Rwandans Gaël Faye, the story of a childhood in Burundi during the civil war, "Petit pays" becomes a film by Eric Barbier, which shows the rise of violence and its repercussions on a family in a more frontal, but without demonstrative images.

Like the book, inspired by the author's childhood, Eric Barbier's film ("The Promise of Dawn"), in theaters on Wednesday, tells the daily life of Gabriel, a Franco-Rwandan who grew up in Burundi in the 90s, before his life was turned upside down by the separation of his parents, the civil war and the genocide in neighboring Rwanda.

Gaël Faye says he was shaken by the film. "What shocked me already was the fact that it was tightened, in 1 hour and 45 minutes. We don't take a break, we are there in the room. It is also the stacking of situations, this moment when we has the impression of being in apnea at the end of the film ", added to the" musical tension ", he explained to journalists including AFP, stressing that he was able to put away what he experienced in the novel thanks to "poetic images".

"When Eric (Barbier) takes hold of this story, he writes it in another way. And I have to lower my guard, because I have to go into his story," said the singer again, composer and writer.

But for him, "the tension of his childhood was much greater than that which there is in the film". "That is also why it shocked me, it is that my father and my sister saw it, and my father told me + what a childhood you had +".

Where the book focused on the nostalgic and poetic evocation of a childhood lost through the story of a band of boys living in the great outdoors, seen at children's height, the film also addresses it but tightens more on the family unit.

He tells the daily life of Gabriel, his parents and his little sister, in their house from where they hear the stories and the sounds of the war.

"I pushed the fact that there is this house. Everything is happening there", explains Eric Barbier, stressing that "gradually, things close and we are more in this closed which is more anxiety inducing".

For the director, who chose not to show images of the genocide, because "there was none in the novel", "the strength of the book" is that all the events "come through family and friends. "

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