01/06/2022 - CANNES 2022: The duo of Belgian directors talk about trying to put the viewer in the shoes of two brothers who go to Syria to fight for ISIS

Fresh off making Bad Boys for Life, Belgian directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah waltzed onto the Croisette at Cannes with Rebel [+see also:
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Cineuropa: How did you come up with the crazy idea of mixing a rap musical with a war drama about ISIS in Syria?
Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah: Music is such an important part of Arab and Islamic culture, and you sometimes forget that, especially when talking about this subject matter. We grew up around Arab culture: music, poetry and dance, as well as Arabian Nights. Rap is part of that street culture of the hood, of Molenbeek; it's something that's close to the people with a Moroccan or an immigrant background. Aboubakr Bensaihi, the main actor, is a rapper from Molenbeek, so that's his form of expression. Music and dance can really touch you on an emotional level more than any words can. Also, it seems appropriate to use music, especially as ISIS was against music, against musical instruments and against female voices.

How did you strike the right balance between the music and the drama?
When the music played, we wanted it to come from a realistic place. So, we wanted to have a realistic vibe, but at the same time have this big, operatic, epic cinema feeling. Finding that balance was not easy. But we worked with our choreographer, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, who is one of the biggest in the world.

How did you get Sidi to agree to take part in the film?
He is a Moroccan from Antwerp. He read the script and understood it, sometimes better than us. His poetry and dance took it to another level. Originally, we were very scared of the music sequences; we only had two musical moments in the script, as we thought that if it didn’t work out, we could remove those scenes and have the movie play without any musical interludes. Then, we were so happy with it during filming that we thought we needed to end with that, so we added another musical sequence that wasn't in the script.

It's much more of a family movie than your previous works. What made you want to concentrate on this aspect?
That's kind of our Hirokazu Kore-eda side of the film. We saw a lot of his movies and met him in 2015 at Toronto, when we were at the festival with Black [+see also:
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film profile], and he said it's so good to have a family dynamic in one’s films. So we said that one day, we were going to do a Kore-eda movie. We blended all of the different influences, like Spike Lee, Oliver Stone and also Spielberg, and that's how we created that mix of all the movies that are real passions for us.

Did you know you wanted to cast someone who is also a musician in the lead role?
We worked with Aboubakr Bensaihi in our previous movie, and he knows people who went to Syria, so it's a world he is familiar with, and he shares the same trauma. Given that he's a genius at writing rap, we knew he would be perfect from the start, but he had to learn how to dance – he had never danced before.