JEAN GENET, Our Father of the Flowers

This film started the day I met the guardians of Jean Genet’s grave. It was by sheer chance that I found myself in front of this grave, of which I had been ordered to film images.
Today, I realize that it was the rather exceptional relationship between the guards and this dead person that led me to open the books of Jean Genet, guided by an unconscious need to uncover a link between this family of simple and illiterate people and one of the greatest authors of the 20th century. Reading his autobiographical novels bewildered me:
When I was eight years old, my mother died. I became a ward of the state and was placed in the Prevost orphanage, in the heart of Picardy. As soon as we arrived, I was given a kit: sheets, underwear, blouse, black ankle boots, marked with a matriculation number.
From then on, I was number 14. We were indeed all fed and washed, but by foreign, brutal hands. We remained among the poor, out of the world, apart.
When I discovered «The Miracle of the Rose» I was shocked to plunge back into the world of the children of my orphanage. A world forged with hatred, love, violence and genius, treachery and fidelity. Jean Genet had given them a voice, a form of recognition. Better yet, he gave life to all the orphans, all the abandoned of the earth. «Writing may be what you have left when you are banned from the word» he said.
For my part, I chose to film those to whom this word is precisely not given: the little people, the poor, the prostitutes, the thieves, the mothers, and others. Jean Genet lost his mother and Ilost mine. Of course, mine had not abandoned me, but still, she left me. Liberator, founder, her work undoubtedly helped restore my relationship with the world, with the truth, with the one that allows us not to sink into the denial where the guards of our prison confined us. Genet restored a fair, bright but sometimes painful place to my companions of misfortune. I loved them, they were a bulwark against the ferocity of the world. I shared their fears, their pains, their simple ecstasy, their funniness and, of some, the rage to live.
The author bewildered me but the people of Larache allowed me to discover the man and his immense humanity. About our respective lives, there will not be much in this film, but they certainly explain why I am sensitive to this family whose house lies in the middle of the cemetery, watching day and night over the graves.The cemetery is the main territory of the film. It is even a character in its own right, almost timeless, who survives the stories of so many, and will continue to survive, the place that abolishes our differences, our social distinctions, our smallness and our greatness and where we find ourselves equal.The cemetery is caught between the lighthouse, the prison and the harbour. It presents itself as a small theatre where paths cross.There are the guards and their children, Genet’s old friends, the visitors of Genet, the workers who take care of the stones, a whole back and forth of men and women around the grave, a whole flow of words and silences. It is all these lives,contextualized in this space, that I filmed. Starting with the family of Youness and Naima. Theirhouse stands at the center of the cemetery. A Muslim family watching over an old Christian cemetery. All have a story about Genet. There are those who rubbed shoulders with him without knowing that he was writing, and those who have not known him, if not by hearsay, but who convey rumours, repeat stories, invent fables. All of them maintain the legend of «Saint Genet» without knowing anything about the actor and martyr. And this is the real tomb. Even more than the white tomb faithfully maintained by Naima, it is the words, the actions, the narratives that it is embedded in.
Still, it is the life of the wretched, the left behind, the oppressed that it is about. They are the heroes of his work and of his life. They are also the main characters of this film. They orbit around the tomb of Genet as around a blind spot. But they are not just witnesses, storytellers of legend, a memory of words. They belong to the people of the invisible, those who leave no trace, neither a work, nor a signature, who barely have an existence. Their only good lies in their energy that allows them to overcome dramas, difficulties, submissiveness. Filming, for me, is an act of sharing. It’s a way of being close, of being at one with what's going on around me, around us, the person being filmed and me. Life happens, interviews are tales. It does neither proceed from discourse nor from representation. It is an action of oneself, a rebirth of the world, a movement out of oneself, a confidence, discontinuous but repeating itself on a daily basis.
I hope that this film will pay tribute to all those people whose silent brotherhood - addressed in Genet’s work - is obvious when we watch them live around the poet’s grave. Not to mention the energy, the poetry that often accompanies poverty in the effort to get away from it, not to fall victim to one’s living conditions but to rebel against them in order to open up to other possibilities.
This portrait from Genet to me, from Genet to the people in which everyone can build their own portrait, is deeply bound to the intimate and universal question that the film to come carries: what do we do with our pains? How can we take advantage of the one who inhabits each of us? It is a film nourished by compassion, by which cinema brings us together through storytelling, in order to continue living standing up.