See Paris and die! See Paris Paris and see the world differently!
The title of the debut fiction feature of Belgian writer-director Isabelle Tollenaere (Battles, Victoria), which world premieres on Tuesday, July 7 in the Proxima competition program of the 60th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF), hints at what awaits audiences in the drama about home, the idea of home and displacement.
Repetition as a way of keeping one’s memory of home alive, for example. And the fact that there is also a Paris, kind of, in China – Tianducheng, a huge residential development in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province that mimics buildings, boulevards and fountains in the French capital and even a 354-foot replica of the Eiffel Tower.
Paris Paris follows three men, Yi-En from China, Junior from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Hamzah from Palestine, who are undocumented immigrants and share a squatted apartment in a seemingly abandoned building in Paris. They share the experience of displacement, life in exile and the fleeting nature of possessions and relationships, as their current safe space comes under threat from outside forces.
The KVIFF website calls the film an “allegory of searching, loss, displacement, and the discovery of new meanings and commonalities.” It is set in “one of Europe’s great cities and in a replica of Paris built in China – a metaphor for the immigrants’ old dream of life in a new home and its gradual transformation into a new dream about their old home.”
Tollenaere also edited Paris Paris, whose cinematographer is Thomas Verijke. The cast is led by Yi-En Chen, David Mutamba and Mahmoud Beshtawi. Square Eyes is handling international sales on the film from producers Bo de Group and Hans Everaert of Menuetto.
Given her background in documentary, you may wonder if her doc work led Tollenaere to Paris Paris. Back in 2014, she first read an article online about the replica of Paris in China, and “I was immediately fascinated by this,” the filmmaker recalls. “It set many thoughts in motion, and I almost immediately had this idea of doubling the same city in one single film, what this could entail, what could happen, what this could mean, and how I could connect these two places, besides their identical appearance.”
It also led her to spending three months in China. “I was based in Shanghai, which is not that far from Tianducheng,” she tells THR. “I was confronted with this huge construction fever, unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. And then there seemed to be demolition happening everywhere I looked, and so I started to dig deeper into this drastically changing landscape and environment. I heard testimonies of people saying that, if they had left home for a while, when they came back, they couldn’t recognize the place anymore, or they couldn’t find their way home anymore. This is when the themes of loss, disappearance, memory, and the precariousness of home first started emerging.”
Originally, Tollenaere thought about filming a Chinese community in Paris, France, but gradually her approach shifted to a story featuring three protagonists, each coming from a very different place in the world.
How did she cast the characters? It all started with Yi-En. “We were both at the same artist residency back in 2018. He’s a dancer and choreographer, and I met him there,” Tollenaere tells THR. “At first, I didn’t think of casting him for the film. I just really liked him, and we hung out, and it was only after a while that I realized that he would be really, really great for the film, so I asked him. He doesn’t have any experience with acting. But from that point on, I continued writing the film with him in mind.”
She met the two others “much later, when I organized a casting for the film,” the filmmaker shares. “But I wanted to cast people who had similar experiences as the characters in the film, Yi-En being the exception to that. Because I come from a documentary background, I’ve always welcomed people helping shape a film. So there are many elements that come from the actors that I was allowed to include in the script.”
How foreign was writing a fiction feature instead of making a doc for Tollenaere? “I always made reality-based films before. They were always hybrid films and had fiction involved, but stayed more on the documentary side of things, so I didn’t really have any intention of making a fiction film,” she recalls. “There were a few reasons why this shifted along the way, and it just happened really gradually. For example, some of the topics I was dealing with were not easy to access.”
The filmmaker had the title Paris Paris from the very beginning. “Normally, I have a working title that always changes, but with this one, it was there from the beginning,” Tollenaere tells THR. “On one level, obviously, it’s about the two Parises. But also, repetition is used throughout the film as a way of remembering, so the title is very much linked to the theme of memory. The driving and opposing forces in the film are remembering and forgetting and repeating and disappearing.”
Language, and its power, is also a recurring theme in Paris Paris, given how it is tied to the notion of “home.” “When you leave your country and speak in your mother tongue, that gives you a very strong feeling of coming home,” the writer-director explains. “The characters come home in different ways in the film – through language, through memories, through objects, because if you carry personal objects with you from the place you called home, it’s like you’re carrying a part of that with you.”
Paris Paris shows characters learning French, a new language, which has almost the opposite effect of creating a sense of home. “Because the vocabulary is so limited in this language, and the phrases they learn in the language course are so generic and full of cliches of the new country, they become meaningless in a sense,” Tollenaere highlights. “That really emphasizes their position as newcomers and their uncomfortable position and the experience of foreignness and alienation.”
Given the themes and topics explored in Paris Paris, you may wonder if the filmmaker thinks of it as a political movie. “Yeah, to me, it’s very much a political film,” Tollenaere tells THR. “First of all, you have as the protagonists three undocumented immigrants, and you see their struggle and difficulties. I think the film is very political, but it’s not a statement that’s in your face. That’s not my style.”
How about the fact that Hamzah is Palestinian? “At first, that was a coincidence, because the actual nationalities were left open in the script,” the writer-director says. “When I cast Mahmoud for the role, the fact that he’s Palestinian became part of the film. It started as a coincidence, but I’m really glad about that because this is such an urgent topic that we need to keep addressing. It’s something that touches me a lot, and that makes me feel so powerless. So, I’m really glad that it became part of the film, and even though it’s not the main topic, we get to address it.”
Tollenaere returned to China with a small crew to shoot the Chinese take on Paris. “We were there for only a week, and I think we filmed for four or five days, because we only shot exterior scenes,” she recalls.
Beyond the visuals and the characters, the Belgian creative was focused on getting the tone of Paris Paris right. There is drama, there is comedy, there is warmth and all sorts of other emotions. “I was really seeking this balance between tragedy and comedy, or heaviness and lightheartedness,” Tollenaere tells THR. “It’s political, but there’s also lightness in the film. That was very important for me, because even if we experience grief and are in a very difficult situation, there’s always humor. We need humor in order to survive and in order to function. Especially with this kind of subject matter, it’s easy to show people only in their misery, but I really wanted to show them also in their strength and their humanness. They are humans in an inhuman situation, and I wanted to show them in their resilience and hopefulness.”
