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Bilall Fallah: On the first day of school, which was all only, like, artistic white people, he was the only Moroccan. So I asked him, "Are you Moroccan? And he said, "Yeah." So we formed a gang together, and made movies together. It came naturally: Every time I made a movie, he was on my set, and every time he made a movie, I was on set. It was like our minds were connected, sharing the same vision.
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Adil El Arbi: Yeah, in film school. We didn't even pass first year because everybody thought our films sucked.Fallah: We both flunked. And they were fucking racist.El Arbi: But the kind of movies we made were actually quite commercial. We were inspired by movies by [Martin] Scorsese and Spike Lee and whole bunch of directors. While the movies [the instructors] wanted to see were very artsy movies that you would see at festivals. It was a few years before they had some kind of respect for us.It's kind of the opposite here where people who try to make art films are told they should be more commercial. So, you did one other full length, and anything else?
El Arbi: Every year in film school you have to make a short movie, and every short movie we made was in the same universe that we use in our long features. So the last short movie we made won some prizes, and one of those was a budget for a new short movie. But with that we said, "Fuck short movies; let's make a long feature." It was our first movie, Image, which was about a Moroccan gangster and a journalist in a neighborhood in Brussels. And then the second movie is Black. And we hope we can make a shitload of other movies.So obviously you guys are familiar with the scene you're portraying in the film. Can you give us a little background on that side of Brussels. I mean, I was there like 10 years ago, and saw a very different side of the city.
El Arbi: We read this book [Black] in school, as you read a lot of stuff that's aimed at teenagers. I wanted to read it because it was about black gangs in Brussels. There are about 35 gangs in the city that are active, more or less, and we know this kind of world, because we know lots of black people and Moroccan people in this immigrant community. It's our world. And we felt connected to the characters.
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El Arbi: In Brussels, when you're Moroccan or you're black, you have a hard time finding a normal job. Even though Brussels is very rich, the population of Brussels is very poor. You have one million people coming in there to work every day, but the people who live there are very very poor. There's Moroccans, and blacks, and people from Eastern Europe, and for anyone with a foreign sounding name, they have a problem finding a job. So they don't belong to the society. And a lot of those young people, they see their big brothers or older friends who don't get a job, and so they are thinking, why should I try? So they get into some criminal activity, in a group where they feel like, I am accepted and I have an identity—I am thought of as Black Bronx, that's who I am. And that's clear because I'm not part of society. A lot of those people just want to belong somewhere, and they feel like there's no real future for them. They feel always like an immigrant, even if they are born here or their parents are born here.
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El Arbi: Most of the criminal activity that happened around 2008-2009, right when that book [Black] came out, was in the African community. It was the African gangs fighting for the same turf. But we wanted to explore some of the smaller gangs that act criminal or aren't as dangerous as the ones in the African neighborhoods. They act really different. Sometimes you have wars between neighborhoods—it's not always wars between African gangs and Moroccan gangs. It'll be two Moroccan gangs against each other, one from the north of Brussels against one from the south of Brussels. But we thought it would be interesting to show those two kinds of gangs, because the main characters are very similar [even though they're from different gangs]. And that's the beauty of the story.By focusing on these two characters and their worlds, there's not a lot of the rest of Brussels. There are not a lot of white people in the film.
El Arbi: Just the cops. The racist cops.What was the thinking behind setting it up that way?
El Arbi: What you see in the movie is the real neighborhoods in Brussels, and the world that they live in. So you can see it's really difficult to have a good future in that kind of environment. So it happens in the underground in the metro subway station, and in their neighborhoods.
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Fallah: All the Flemish films are full of white people. You never have Moroccans or black people.El Arbi: If you come from another country and watch Flemish television, you think Belgium is all white. And all the famous people in Belgium are white. Even though Brussels and Antwerp and Ghent are multicultural. So that's one of the things that's going to be a shock and controversial in Flanders—it's something new. When you see a Moroccan person in a Flemish movie, they're usually a drug dealer or a terrorist. So we chose to make a movie full of blacks and Moroccans, and also show the good and bad side of both groups.And is this how you ended up using non-professional actors?
Fallah: Since all the television shows are full of white actors, we weren't going to find them there. So we did street casting to find people who matched the characters. We had 400 auditions and saw them all, and did like four months to find those guys. We chose 16 of them, who we knew were talented, like diamonds. And then we like professionalized them by doing two months of rehearsing.
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El Arbi: We were just shooting, and then he got arrested, and then a few hours later he was free. And he never really told us what it was about. But he also talked about his father, who was known in the neighborhood with the gangs, so we assumed it was something like that.Fallah: But most of the actors really played a role. But they know the world and they know the language of the street. And that was really important to us, to be as authentic as possible and to have it almost as documentary acting. And I think we did that.What was that like for them to have this opportunity to make a movie.
El Arbi: When we did the casting, most of them didn't believe we were really film directors. We had to show them our first movie to prove that we weren't bullshitters. Because we're on the street asking girls who are like 16-years-old: "Hey, do you want to play in a movie?" [Laughs].
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Fallah: We showed the movie through the French speaking channel and they didn't have any problem understanding it. Though, even for us there were little words and little jokes that we didn't understand.El Arbi: We showed it to a famous Belgian artist, Stromae, and he was there with his black family and friends, and they were laughing their asses off. They understood all those sentences—so the actors were really thinking about their lines. But it's the images that really tell the story.What was it like shooting the film?
Both: It was war.El Arbi: We told the actors that if we want to make this movie it's like going into war. One-hundred percent, you have to give yourself, heart, and mind. And in some of those neighborhoods, there was some violence, like threatening to stab one of the white people on the crew.
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El Arbi: Very interesting. The book was really hard.The book already had a reputation?
El Arbi: Yeah, it was really popular. So when we shot the movie, we would shoot the hardest version possible and then tone it down a little. But the first version that we showed the producer and the distributors, they were like, keep it that way: keep it hard, keep it rough, you don't need to tone it down. So it's pretty much the version we have now. I think the good thing is that it will not go unnoticed. And that is a good thing for young directors.Black plays at Toronto International Film Festival on Friday, September 11, 9 PM; Sunday, September 13, 10 PM; and Saturday, September 19, 3 PM.Follow Chris Bilton on Twitter.