He could have sold the script for “The Arab of the Future” to Hollywood, and ultimately, Riad Sattouf continued in comics, a successful series. The designer who grew up between Syria and Brittany, published this October 8, “Me, Fadi, the stolen brother”. The story of this little brother, who lived with him in Rennes and who was kidnapped by their father in 1992.
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From the beginning, this was the project, kept secret. Fadi is Riad’s youngest brother. We saw him disappear in volume 4 of “The Arab of the Future”, then find his elder in volume 6. They then spoke to each other in English: he had forgotten French, since his father had taken him by force to Syria in early 1990s, when he was 5 years old. “When I found him again in 2011 and 2012, I was extremely impatient to ask him lots of questions. It was as if this ghost brother had incarnated into reality“, says the author of “Me, Fadi, the stolen brother”.
Their interviews at the time provide the material for this heartbreaking adventure. Fadi grew up carefree as a kindergarten student in Rennes. Then one day, his father Abdel-Razak, who felt rejected in France and wanted to convince his wife to return to her hometown, Ter Maaleh near Homs in Syria, made him take the plane. His mother and two brothers, who remained in Rennes, would not see him again for decades. Between 1992 and 2011.
TO READ. The passage of Riad Sattouf to Rennes during a dedication
Cruel fate than that of an inconsolable boy, victim of conflicts that are beyond him. It is all the better rendered as “Fadi’s memories of his childhood were extremely precise“, noted Riad Sattouf.
Fadi’s story was such that, fundamentally, it was somehow untellable, in the sense that its harshness could disqualify it… But for me as an author, it is an incredible challenge to write this untellable
According to him, “it was super important to give this whole story, in full, to the comic strip. I couldn’t keep one part of it. We had to go to the end“.
TO READ. Riad Sattouf wins the Grand Prize at the Angoulême Comics Festival
Started at a time when Riad Sattouf had just known “a huge oven“at the cinema with”Jacky in the kingdom of girls“, “The Arab of the future” brought glory and wealth to an author who feared falling into oblivion. The success figures are dizzying: 3.5 million copies, translations into 23 languages. And they attracted the desires of candidates for a adaptation on the big screen or in series.
“I always refused. It was even offered to me in Hollywood. A superb proposal a few years ago. But no, I don’t want“, replies Riad Sattouf. If such an adaptation is filmed, “it will be accessible to people who have not read the books. For example, it was out of the question for me that my children would see the films +The Lord of the Rings+ or +Harry Potter+ without having read the books. So we read them all first. For +The Arab of the Future+, I can’t demand that from the public“, he explains.
But he didn’t break away from cinema. Between two comic strips, he is still working on the script for the film that he will shoot with Les Inconnus, Bernard Campan, Didier Bourdon and Pascal Légitimus.
Project of which he does not want to divulge any details, because, he says, he likes to create “the surprise“. In the meantime, he publishes the life of his mother, each month in Notre temps, the magazine that hung on the night table of his grandmother in Cap Fréhel, when he was little.
(With AFP)
