He defied death and would have to keep doing it: as a lone effeminate youth in his neighborhood, he was a target of sexual violence every day. So true.At twelve years old in Salé, Morocco, Abdellah Taïa touched a high-voltage generator and lay dead for an hour before surprising everyone and breathing again. As François Truffaut said, “life is cinema, cinema is life.” That is so true. And, of course, I want to continue making movies. My last novel, “Infidels,” is coming out in America in 2014, translated into English by Seven Storie Press. It will be released theatrically in France in 2014. Where is film already officially set to screen next?Īfter Venice and Toronto, the film be shown soon in many other film festivals: Reykjavik, Namur, Sao Paulo, Geneva. I think Arabs are ready to see the reality my film is showing. Arab Spring started seriously the change of the mentalities in the Arab countries. I didn’t care at all about that… I hope also that the film will be released in my country Morocco. I did not want to be faithful to the book. The film is very different from the book. “Salvation Army” is actually a story of a solitude. Like so many Moroccans, he deals with reality with some perversity. The hero is a gay Moroccan but he is not a cliché victim.
The images seem slow and silent, but they are not. I hope that they will get the rhythm, the hidden secrets. I hope the people will first see it as a film and as a vision. What do you hope people take from the film? I was not only a director, I was a fighter, warrior. But, in general, to make movies is not something easy at all. We were afraid of being attacked or stopped. It was also hard to shoot this film in Morocco because of the subject of homosexuality. So, we did “Salvation Army” with little money and thanks to my four producers, who found the right people to work with me. The hero - in most of the film, at least - is fifteen years old and gay. We had many difficulties to find the financing. No one could write the adaptation in my place. To show the silence imposed on everyone there. I had to find the right distance, the right images to say the hard reality of my country Morocco, and not only for gay people. Although this film is coming from an autobiographic work, I had to objectify the story, to make it not only mine. I said I had no desire to work on something already published and “finished.” And then I realized that I could totally forget about the book and invent something else with a cinematographic vocabulary. He said that I should make a movie from this book. What led to the decision to turn your book into a film, and to direct it yourself?Ī French producer, Claude Kunetz, read “Salvation Army,” loved it, and contacted me.
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