Production and distribution :
Zarina Khan Productions
15, bd de la Chapelle 75010 Paris - France
Tel. : 33 (0) 142 09 05 58 - Fax: 33 (0) 142 05 15 10
E-mail : shelter@zarinakhan.com
http://www.zarinakhan.org |
Programming :
Zarina Khan Productions
15, bd de la Chapelle 75010 Paris - France
Tel. : 33 (0) 142 09 05 58 - Fax: 33 (0) 142 05 15 10
E-mail : shelter@zarinakhan.com
http://www.zarinakhan.org |
Where others speak of violence, I have found respect. Where people clamour they are "fed up with it all", I have found pleasure and energy in working together in a group. Where some talk about "problem areas", I have discovered the deep desire of youth to question the world and themselves. For fourteen years, I have been listening in my workshops to these young people and helping them to express themselves and, to transmit to others a message of hope and solidarity. But the force of this message is constantly justified by an over-dramatised treatment by the media of the reality of the situation.
Dramas exist everywhere, not only in the suburbs but in the course of everyone's life. To learn to get through them, to accept them as tests teaching us to establish contact with others, to search within ourselves, to find our place in the history of mankind, that is the way to learn philosophy. In fact it was in the city suburb of Blanc-Mesnil that I was to meet these young philosophers. From their interrogations sprang a multicoloured poetry which inspired us to make a fictional film. So that "creation" cocked a snoop at "repression", enabling us to share our joy in our journey together and show on the screen a new perception of these misunderstood citizens.
"ADOS AMOR, it's a film about the suburbs, isn't it ?" queried a journalist. "No !" replied the young actors in ADOS AMOR. "Its just a film. Do life, death, love, dignity exist only in the suburbs ?"
In every town, children are born and grow up. This suburban city is like many others throughout the world; but because of the people living there, it incorporates a multitude of traditions and cultures. It is this remarkable cultural melting pot that the present generation of adolescents is impatient to achieve ; only the means to do so are lacking.
To all those who have helped us make ADOS AMOR, to those who will respond to its message and carry it far and wide, thank you !
The project of the film ADOS AMOR was born in Blanc-Mesnil, a suburb on the outskirts of Paris, and stems from work carried out between 1994 and 1996 by adolescents at a college and a professional lycée, in writing and theater workshops led by Zarina Khan. These 15 to 20 year-old pupils, like others living in towns and cities throughout France, experience joys and difficulties between the family and school, between childhood and adulthood. For the first time they all began to write about themselves, their problems, their desires, their interrogations.
Who am I, a girl or boy of 16 or 17, in 1997 ? What can I do with my life ? Between boredom and fear. Between boredom and the unknown. With no one to guide me. The emptiness of the past and gaps in my personal history. Ignorance of the native country of my parents. The impossibility to visualise the past and assume it, to understand where I come from and thus to imagine my future. Only the immediate present remains. A present in which one is tempted to race through the day, getting it over as quickly as possible. I was born with the colour of my skin, with my name and I was told they meant that I "belonged" to a particular group. Will this "belonging" determine my destiny ? Is it to be my fate to have no power over the course of events, over my own life or that of those around me ?
At the second stage, my pupils invented seven different stories in which the characters involved incarnated these fundamental themes. In acting their respective parts, each acts his own life, telling an authentic story of adolescents in search of themselves.
The first character these young people created was the "wise man", the one they most needed, who could tell them the traditional tales full of the wisdom of the past, to guide them through the present and the future. Thus the colours of African traditions are interwoven in the play of the actors in ADOS AMOR, as the old man tells his tales to the little boy.
Then the chief elephant said : "Men and famine have caused us suffering. We must emigrate if we don't want to die. Our road will be as straight as our life has been. But our children must always know where they come from so that they can enrich the country where they live with the colours of their native land."
