Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, between Hollywood and Molenbeek
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It was the last Hollywood blockbuster before the pandemic. A film which revived a tired duo, that formed by Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, to which the professionals did not grant a great future. To everyone’s surprise, Bad Boys for Life was a public and critical success. It was signed Adil and Bilall. Adil El Arbi, 34, born in Antwerp, Bilall Fallah, two years his senior, originally from Vilvoorde, authors of three feature films which combined the chronicle of the urban peripheries of Dutch-speaking Belgium and the figures of American hip-hop cinema , had succeeded in forcing the door of the major American studios.
Back in Europe to present rebel, a film on the drift of some of their contemporaries, between Molenbeek and Raqqa, which they carried for years and shot in Jordan with Belgian and French funds, Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah arrive, despite themselves, surrounded by din aroused by the case Batgirl. The evasion of this feature film by the management of Warner Discovery, which decided that the film, shot and in the process of being edited, would not be released in theaters or on the group’s platform, is unprecedented. “We did not know that we were going to mark the history of cinema in this way”, sighs Adil El Arbi, the spokesperson for the duo. Denied access to the images they shot, the two young filmmakers heard like everyone else David Zaslav, the boss of Warner Discovery, develop the tax arguments which led him to erase Batgirl of the filmography of its authors and its performers (including Michael Keaton, who took over the role of Batman).
This pitfall on an American course so far without fault (the duo also collaborated, as directors and producers, on the series Miss Marvel) in no way tempers the enthusiasm that Adil and Bilall show in defending rebela feature film whose project began to germinate at the end of 2013. “We knew people who had gone to Syria, a son, a cousinremembers Adil El Arbi. The authorities let it happen, because many had criminal records and it suited them. Until then, terrorism was very far away, and when the videos of executions arrived, we saw people who looked like us, who spoke Dutch like us. It felt like a historical phenomenon. »
“ Historical document »
This project should have followed on from Black, their second feature film released in 2015, whose success in festivals had earned them the notice of an American manager, who allowed them to sign with one of Hollywood’s biggest talent agencies, CAA. At the same time as the trajectory of the directors took them away from Europe, the story of the young people who left for Syria plunged into a horror whose bottom we could not glimpse, leading to a permanent rewriting of the script.
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