After winning the prices for best actor for his role in the film A son (2019), directed by Mehdi Barsaoui, at the Venice Festival (Horizons section), at the Hainan International Film Festival (China) and Lights of the Foreign Press (26th edition), Sami Bouajila comes to win the César 2021 for best actor, always for this same role.
By receiving his trophy, Sami Bouajila delivered a very moving speech, paying tribute to his father.
“” I often have the impression that the roles choose us more than we choose them.
When I started filmingA son Who talks about filiation, I had just accompanied my father on his native land, in which he now rests.
We shot the film in the Tataouine desert a few kilometers from the Libyan border, where in the 1940s, my father then aged ten years, crocratically crossed this same border with his father to join the native village of my grandfather whom I have never known. All his life he told me about this journey … Until the end … it came back … He told me the desert, the smugglers, the fatigue, and especially the stupor to wake up one morning without his father, who to go faster and fearing the roundups, had left him to the good care of a passer until his return.
By thinking about it today, I have the feeling that all this lived to me. The character invited himself to me. He inspired me his dismay, his looks, his love. I lived it. I gave him my breath, my energy…. Mehdi Barsaoui the director and Najla ben Aballah, My partner did the rest, and with them I share this price. And I would like to quickly quote producers and distributors who are really the adventurers of modern times and without whom this film and so many other films would not have seen the light of day: Habib Attia, Chantal Fisher, Marc Irmer, Sarah Chazelle and all the people of the day2fête. »»
A sonthe first fiction feature by Mehdi Barsaoui, had a very good career in the various film festivals in which he was selected, in particular at International Cairo Film Festival in November 2019 where he won the Special Jury Prize for Jury Abu Seif, the UNFPA Prize (United Nations Population Fund) and the Arab film Prize, all sections combined.
Neïla Driss
