The writer and filmmaker Mehdi Charef died on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday at the age of 73announced his family and his publisher to AFP. He died in his sleep at his home in the Paris region. “We will keep from him his immense generosity, his gentleness, his poetry, his playfulness and his inexhaustible interest in human beings, against and against their fragilities and their contradictions. declared his family in a press release.
A figure in French social cinema, he established himself at the start of the 1980s with Archimedes’ Harem Teaadaptation of his novel published in 1983. The film, centered on the life of a public housing project in the Paris suburbs and the journey of two young people in search of a future, marked a generation with its look at the working classes and the trajectories of young people on the margins, and contributed to the emergence of a new voice in French cinema. The work was praised by critics and awarded the Jean-Vigo prize in 1985, before receiving the César for best first film in 1986establishing Mehdi Charef as a new figure in auteur cinema in France.
Cinema from childhood
Born in Algeria on October 24, 1952, Mehdi Charef arrived in France at the age of 10 to join his father, a sharpening worker in a factory, after the war of independence. Before embarking on a literary and cinematic career, he himself worked in a factory for thirteen years, from the age of 18 to 31, a founding experience which imbued his outlook on the working world and popular circles. Very early, he discovered cinema at the age of 9 by seeing a black and white westerna revelation that he summarized in 1987 in Télérama : “And since then, I always walked around with a camera, in my schoolbag when I went to school, and in my bag when I went to the factory.”
A work centered on “the excluded”
Author of several novels, including Meriem’s Harki (1989) et Rue des Pâquerettes (Out of reach, 2019), he notably recounted his childhood in France and his move to Nanterre, a work rewarded by the literary prize of the Golden Gate. Director of around ten feature films for which he also wrote the screenplays, he has produced a series of notable works such as Miss Mona (1986), In the land of Juliets (1991), selected at the Cannes Film Festival, Marie-Line (1999) with Muriel Robin or even Graziella (2015). Through all of his filmography and his novels, Mehdi Charef has constructed a work centered on the excluded and the trajectories of exile, giving a central place to what he called beings.singular“, and leaving a significant mark on the French cultural landscape.
