Workshop with David Oelhoffen

On the third day of the 12th International Film and Music Festival Kustendorf, the audience saw the film Close Enemies by the French director David Oelhoffen, which was followed by a workshop. The film is about the criminal underground and the Moroccan immigrants in Paris, but Oelhoffen underlines that Close Enemies is a film about family. When he was working on the script, he talked with real drug dealers to find out more about personal and family relations. Insisting on realism and the authenticity of the lives he talks about, the author manages to impose topics which, as he says, the French reluctantly talk about – primarily the issues of French colonialism and segregation within the French society. This is a crime-drama, however, Oelhoffen stressed that he never romanticized or glamorized crime, because he feels that there is no lyricism or romanticism to such a life, so it should not be portrayed that way. Not only is it false, such romanticism is dangerous, said Oelhoffen.