The genocide and the civil war through the eyes of a 10-year-old child: Petit Pays , modest and heartbreaking adaptation of the novel by Franco-Rwandan songwriter Gaël Faye, is released in theaters on Friday. The director Éric Barbier ( The promise of the dawn ) delivers a moving translation of this novel inspired in particular by the childhood of Gaël Faye, against the backdrop of rising conflict between Hutu and Tutsi and separation of parents. A bookstore success, and a revelation for its author in 2016, the novel was crowned with several literary awards, and translated into nearly 40 languages.
On screen, little Gabriel (Djibril Vancoppenolle), son of a Frenchman and a Rwandan refugee in Burundi, rediscovers his lost paradise, the happy Bujumbura of this period. Then the switch to civil war in 1993, which marked the end of his innocence. Six months later in neighboring Rwanda, the genocide swept away the Tutsi minority.
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During a screening before the theatrical release, delayed by the coronavirus epidemic and exceptionally scheduled for Friday, Gaël Faye said he was shaken to rediscover his novel in a new way, on the big screen. " What shocked me already is the fact that it is tightened (...). We are not putting on a break, we are there in the room. It is also the stacking of situations, this moment when one has the impression of being in apnea at the end of the film ”, explains Gaël Faye, 38 years old.
“ When Eric (Barbier) takes hold of this story, he writes it in another way. And I have to let my guard down, because I have to go into its history, ”says the singer, composer and writer, who himself grew up in Burundi and from whom part of the family is a refugee. from Rwanda. Where the book focused on the nostalgic and poetic evocation of a childhood lost through the story of a gang of boys living in the great outdoors, seen at child level, the film also addresses it, but tightens more on the family unit.
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It also shows the rise of violence and its repercussions on a family in a more frontal way than the book but without demonstrative images, by recounting the daily life of Gabriel, his parents (Jean-Paul Rouve and Isabelle Kabano) and his little sister. , in their house from where they hear the tales and the sounds of war. “ I pushed the fact that there is this house. Everything happens there ", explains Éric Barbier, stressing that" as and when things are closed "in a" camera which is more anxiety-provoking ".
The film has already been presented in March, before the pandemic, during a moving preview in Kigali, in three crowded theaters of the only cinema in the country, in the presence of the president's wife, Jeannette Kagame - also born in Burundi - from several ministers and many representatives of the Rwandan artistic scene. " This novel and this film are proof that even if you talk about yourself, your origins and your own history, you can talk to the whole world ", Gaël Faye said at the time: "Petit Pays talks about this dream of refugees to one day be able to return to their country ”.
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The film was shot in Rwanda and not in Burundi " because of the political situation " in this country, plunged into a political crisis since 2015, according to the writer and musician, very involved in the writing of the script and the choice of Rwandan actors. Rwanda does not really have a film industry, Gaël Faye and the director had resolved to run mainly amateurs. The film, with a budget of five million euros, was entirely shot in Rwanda, largely in the region of Gisenyi, near the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).