Arriving at the Cannes Film Festival with his dense, captivating second feature Across the Sea, filmmaker Said Hamich Benlarbi is enjoying a moment of huge satisfaction.
"This is my second feature film and there are very few second features in Cannes," says the French-Moroccan director, who also writes and produces. “A lot of first films, a lot of films that are made by very well-known people, very renowned people, but it’s not that common to have a second film presented.”
Indeed, the journey of crafting a follow-up is often more torturous than making that splashy debut. Presented as a Special Screening in Critics’ Week – the sidebar that, two years ago, screened the Oscar-nominated Aftersun with Paul Mescal – Benlarbi seems elated with the reaction to the film at the screenings on Friday.
“It was very emotional to see how people 'felt' the film very strongly," he adds. "A lot of people were crying.” It’s no surprise there was such an outpouring of emotion as Across the Sea is an ambitious and emotive drama about the immigrant experience.
Set over a decade, it follows Nour (Ayoub Gretaa), a small-time dealer who moves to Marseille, illegally. “I myself was in exile,” says Benlarbi, when he explains what led him to create the character. “I left Morocco when I was 11. I left my friends and my mother to go and live with my father in France.
"So I know this feeling and I wanted to speak about it, to tell a story about it, and I chose to do it in a rather melodramatic way, telling 10 years of the life of a Moroccan immigrant.”
Initially, he didn’t set out to make a film spanning such a lengthy period, but it felt increasingly right. “To me, exile is really about time," he adds. "It’s not only about the moment when you leave your country, or lose your roots, it’s the whole spanning of time.”
It’s why he divides the film into chapters, taking on a “novel-like approach” as well as taking inspiration from Gustav Flaubert’s novel A Sentimental Education, one of his favourite books, he says. The movie melodramas of Douglas Sirk, as well as Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven, were also hugely important to him.
Seated in a beachside bar, with the glittering Mediterranean Sea aptly just behind him, Benlarbi was raised in southern France, in the titular city that inspired his 2017 debut Return to Bollene. This time it was the nearby Marseille that drew his attention.
“Marseille is obviously very special for me, but it's also a very special city in France because it’s where a lot of immigrants go, people from Italy, people from Gabor, people from Maghreb," he says. "It is a very mixed city. It is a real melting pot. And it is also for a lot of people who are immigrants, it’s really the heart. Or as we say in French 'the lungs'. And it was important for me to be able to portray how vivid the city is.”
While Return to Bollene deals with a man who returns to France after several years living in Abu Dhabi, his second film is perhaps a deeper exploration of identity. The story spins on Nour befriending a French police officer named Serge (Gregoire Colin) and his wife Noemie (Anna Mouglalis), two people who show him a different way to exist, changing his perspective on life and “enabling” him to move away from the status of a migrant.
Does making the film allow Benlarbi to feel closer to his own roots? Having regularly returned to work in Morocco, he is all too aware of the common feelings towards those who left the country.
“A lot of people, when speaking about exile, would say: 'You’re neither French nor Moroccan,’” he notes. “I’m lucky enough, thanks to what I’ve done professionally but also thanks to the work I've been doing on myself, to nowadays feel entirely French and entirely Moroccan.”
Away from his films, Benlarbi also works as a producer for other Moroccan directors. Last year, he produced Kamal Lazraq’s excellent crime-soaked father-son drama Hounds, which was awarded the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize after it had its premiere at Cannes, and also Deserts by Faouzi Bensaidi, which featured in the festival’s Director’s Fortnight strand.
With fellow Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch’s Everybody Loves Touda also in Cannes this year, does Benlarbi feel like it’s a special time in Moroccan cinema?
He nods, looking enthused by the question. “For some years now, Moroccan cinema is getting quite important at major festivals,” he says. “We had Sofia Alaoui [with last year's film Animalia] in Sundance and Yasmine Benkiran [with the 2022 film Queens] in Venice. So we’ve had the support of public authorities given to the industry of cinema. We just have to hope that this will continue and this will be a stable support to enable the industry to really develop.”
No question, he’s been instrumental in that.
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The specs
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Transmission: 6-speed auto
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Ferrari 12Cilindri specs
Engine: naturally aspirated 6.5-liter V12
Power: 819hp
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Dust and sand storms compared
Sand storm
- Particle size: Larger, heavier sand grains
- Visibility: Often dramatic with thick "walls" of sand
- Duration: Short-lived, typically localised
- Travel distance: Limited
- Source: Open desert areas with strong winds
Dust storm
- Particle size: Much finer, lightweight particles
- Visibility: Hazy skies but less intense
- Duration: Can linger for days
- Travel distance: Long-range, up to thousands of kilometres
- Source: Can be carried from distant regions
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'How To Build A Boat'
Jonathan Gornall, Simon & Schuster
How to wear a kandura
Dos
- Wear the right fabric for the right season and occasion
- Always ask for the dress code if you don’t know
- Wear a white kandura, white ghutra / shemagh (headwear) and black shoes for work
- Wear 100 per cent cotton under the kandura as most fabrics are polyester
Don’ts
- Wear hamdania for work, always wear a ghutra and agal
- Buy a kandura only based on how it feels; ask questions about the fabric and understand what you are buying
Global Fungi Facts
• Scientists estimate there could be as many as 3 million fungal species globally
• Only about 160,000 have been officially described leaving around 90% undiscovered
• Fungi account for roughly 90% of Earth's unknown biodiversity
• Forest fungi help tackle climate change, absorbing up to 36% of global fossil fuel emissions annually and storing around 5 billion tonnes of carbon in the planet's topsoil
What is blockchain?
Blockchain is a form of distributed ledger technology, a digital system in which data is recorded across multiple places at the same time. Unlike traditional databases, DLTs have no central administrator or centralised data storage. They are transparent because the data is visible and, because they are automatically replicated and impossible to be tampered with, they are secure.
The main difference between blockchain and other forms of DLT is the way data is stored as ‘blocks’ – new transactions are added to the existing ‘chain’ of past transactions, hence the name ‘blockchain’. It is impossible to delete or modify information on the chain due to the replication of blocks across various locations.
Blockchain is mostly associated with cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Due to the inability to tamper with transactions, advocates say this makes the currency more secure and safer than traditional systems. It is maintained by a network of people referred to as ‘miners’, who receive rewards for solving complex mathematical equations that enable transactions to go through.
However, one of the major problems that has come to light has been the presence of illicit material buried in the Bitcoin blockchain, linking it to the dark web.
Other blockchain platforms can offer things like smart contracts, which are automatically implemented when specific conditions from all interested parties are reached, cutting the time involved and the risk of mistakes. Another use could be storing medical records, as patients can be confident their information cannot be changed. The technology can also be used in supply chains, voting and has the potential to used for storing property records.
U19 WORLD CUP, WEST INDIES
UAE group fixtures (all in St Kitts)
- Saturday 15 January: UAE beat Canada by 49 runs
- Thursday 20 January: v England
- Saturday 22 January: v Bangladesh
UAE squad:
Alishan Sharafu (captain), Shival Bawa, Jash Giyanani, Sailles
Jaishankar, Nilansh Keswani, Aayan Khan, Punya Mehra, Ali Naseer, Ronak Panoly,
Dhruv Parashar, Vinayak Raghavan, Soorya Sathish, Aryansh Sharma, Adithya
Shetty, Kai Smith
Sole survivors
- Cecelia Crocker was on board Northwest Airlines Flight 255 in 1987 when it crashed in Detroit, killing 154 people, including her parents and brother. The plane had hit a light pole on take off
- George Lamson Jr, from Minnesota, was on a Galaxy Airlines flight that crashed in Reno in 1985, killing 68 people. His entire seat was launched out of the plane
- Bahia Bakari, then 12, survived when a Yemenia Airways flight crashed near the Comoros in 2009, killing 152. She was found clinging to wreckage after floating in the ocean for 13 hours.
- Jim Polehinke was the co-pilot and sole survivor of a 2006 Comair flight that crashed in Lexington, Kentucky, killing 49.
The specs: 2018 Maserati Levante S
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Engine: 3.0-litre V6
Transmission: Eight-speed automatic
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Torque: 580Nm @ 4,500rpm
Fuel economy, combined: 10.9L / 100km
Read more from Aya Iskandarani
Greatest of All Time
Starring: Vijay, Sneha, Prashanth, Prabhu Deva, Mohan
Lexus LX700h specs
Engine: 3.4-litre twin-turbo V6 plus supplementary electric motor
Power: 464hp at 5,200rpm
Torque: 790Nm from 2,000-3,600rpm
Transmission: 10-speed auto
Fuel consumption: 11.7L/100km
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Price: From Dh590,000
Benefits of first-time home buyers' scheme
- Priority access to new homes from participating developers
- Discounts on sales price of off-plan units
- Flexible payment plans from developers
- Mortgages with better interest rates, faster approval times and reduced fees
- DLD registration fee can be paid through banks or credit cards at zero interest rates
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Sri Lanka squad for tri-nation series
Angelo Mathews (c), Upul Tharanga, Danushka Gunathilaka, Kusal Mendis, Dinesh Chandimal, Kusal Janith Perera, Thisara Perera, Asela Gunaratne, Niroshan Dickwella, Suranga Lakmal, Nuwan Pradeep, Dushmantha Chameera, Shehan Madushanka, Akila Dananjaya, Lakshan Sandakan and Wanidu Hasaranga
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Read more from Johann Chacko
