Cannes 2023

Cannes 2023: Moroccan Kamal Lazraq's very successful "Les Meutes", a fight of dogs and men

Kamal Lazraq, Moroccan director of the film "Les Meutes", in the official selection of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. © Siegfried Forster / RFI

Text by: Siegfried Forster Follow

6 min

Moroccan director Kamal Lazraq was able to experience this weekend the world premiere of his film in the official selection of the Cannes Film Festival. Filmed captivating at night in Casablanca, "Les Meutes" is a noir thriller as serious in substance as funny in form, with non-professional actors bursting the screen.

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RFI: Being with his first feature film in the official selection of the largest film festival in the world and welcoming a thunderous applause from the audience, how did you experience all this?

Kamal Lazraq: We were very nervous before the screening, because we finished the film a few days ago, post-production was finishing very recently. So, here in Cannes, it was really the first meeting with the public. The welcome was a relief. The selection was a great source of pride. We shot the film with non-professional actors. There were a lot of unforeseen events, improvisations, problems to solve. So, to let go of the film in front of this audience and to have a nice reception, it was a great relief.

Les Meutes is the story of a father and a son, both broke. They find themselves, in spite of themselves, with a corpse to disappear. You filmed this whole adventure at night in the working-class suburbs of Casablanca. You yourself were born in this city. Was it still your fantasy to shoot your first film at night in Casablanca?

The film stems from a previous short film that I had also made at night in Casablanca, with the same working method, also with non-professional actors. The experience was much shorter, but very intense. Casablanca, at night, there is an infinite potential of stories, themes, genres: burlesque, tragic, humanity, violence... There is something really very rich. So, it seemed natural to me to continue in this way. Above all, I live in Casablanca, I am immersed in this universe which, when you are a director, is very inspiring.

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It is a dark film noir with an irony as fine as it is omnipresent. What does this incredible palette of sublime colors that you were able to create thanks to your night shoot reflect?

With the cinematographer Amine Berrada, we said to ourselves that the actors are at the center of the device, we are not going to recreate artificial lighting, but that we will really base ourselves on the natural lighting of the city. We had to find the right device to take advantage of it and give this aesthetic to the film. That's right, the rendering is quite close to reality. But there is a certain dreaminess that works well in relation to the theme of the film. The faces of the actors are very kinegenic, so sometimes you just had to move them to the right place to have a very cinematic image.

The son Issam and his father Hassan (beautifully interpreted by Ayoub Elaïd and Abdellatif Masstouri) in "Les Meutes", directed by Kamal Lazraq. © Cannes Film Festival 2023

At the beginning and end of the film, there is a fighting dog, but very quickly, we understand that the packs we are talking about here are the human packs, the neighborhood gangs that wage war in the middle of misery. What is very impressive in your very intelligent way of realizing is that you do not guide us with reason, head, but with the five senses: there is the smell of the corpse, the touch between men and dogs, there is what we hear, but we do not see, there is what we see, but, often, only imagines...

What I didn't want to do was a psychological film or too psychological film. I wanted us to have a physical experience. Something organic, carnal. The fact of working with non-professional actors and the very documentary approach we had during the shooting, it allowed us to transcribe the reality of what we had experienced with the actors during the shooting. We shot on chronological time, we were constantly listening to what was happening. This report was not an aesthetic research, it was more that it stemmed from our way of working. All the work that has been done has been done in a very instinctive, very raw way. It's something that has permeated the film. Which is why we have this very carnal relationship with this history.

It's a father-son story, a father and a son who don't stop blaming each other. For the father, the son is not a "real" man. For the son, the father missed his life. The only one who ensures is the grandmother who has values to transmit, confidence, and who knows how to adapt to life. The Packs is also a charge against patriarchy, against outdated masculinity and corrupt policemen.

Masculinity is very present in the film. There are a lot of things that got lost in translation in subtitles. Most of the time, actors talk about that: being a man, virility as a necessarily positive quality. The grandmother is the most grounded, the most stable character in this story. There was the idea of showing how this excess of masculinity could sometimes tend towards an animality, hence the metaphor with dog fighting and this bestiality that can resurface quite strongly during the film.

Beyond the very fine humor, there is also a hope, embodied by water. There is the washing of the body of the deceased man, but also a scene where father and son wash together. Does your film embody the hope of a possible renaissance?

There's a lot of that. In the relationship between father and son, there was this scene where they try to wash away what they have done and experienced. There is still a hardness. In the look between the two, one feels that what was happening could not simply go through washing or something physical. They are, in spite of themselves, impregnated by what they have experienced. This is something that is very present in the relationship between the two characters, the fact that the father will mark the life of his son, negatively, in spite of himself. In this theme of the father-son relationship, that's more what I was looking for. How a father who, at the beginning, was of good will, will lead his son into a hardness that both will regret.

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• Cannes 2023
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