Get the latest gossip
French Directors Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma on Exploring Teenage Angst With Pop Power in Venice Competition Film ‘And Their Children After Them’
Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma discuss their fourth feature, “And Their Children After Them,” which premieres in competition at the Venice Film Festival.
Adapted from a literary sensation that won the Prix Goncourt, France’s equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize, the film explores teenage heartache and working-class doldrums with a novelistic sweep, playing as a coming-of-age power ballad full of operatic emotions and chart-topping tunes. As should come with little surprise, his path is filled with yearning and strife, from an almost-unrequited romantic obsession with the more affluent Steph (Angelina Woreth, of recent Director’s Fortnight winner “This Life of Mine”), to a rivalry with the Moroccan-born Hacine (“Oussekine” lead Sayyid El Alami) that grows more violent over time. Without sugarcoating the story’s tough social setting – often tracking the ways economic precarity can curdle into substance abuse or outright xenophobia in a region that remains a hotbed for the far right – the filmmakers veered away from the social-realist approach common to politically minded festival fare.
Or read this on Variety