02/09/2024 - VENICE 2024: The French filmmaker talks about the genre as a Trojan horse for a story told at a cracking pace and looking at the times, society, an island and the human at large

(© Fabrizio de Gennaro/Cineuropa)

The Mohican [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Frédéric Farrucci
film profile], the second feature by Frédéric Farrucci after Night Ride [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Frédéric Farrucci
film profile], was presented in the Orizzonti Extra programme of the 81st Venice Film Festival.

Cineuropa: Where did the desire to make this film in Corsica come from?
Frédéric Farrucci: In 2017, I directed a documentary about a shepherd on the South coast of Corsica that was meant to evoke his profession and his family history. But these questions were expelled little by little and the discussion turned to an anxiety that wouldn’t leave him: his goats would pass through this place where all these things that make tourism buzz could be built. He was afraid and he’d say that he was “the last of the Mohicans” because he wouldn’t be able to pass on the farm to his sons, that it would be a poisoned chalice. From that reality, I wanted to extrapolate these fears and to stage this situation. I’m Corsican and I also had the desire to go work on that territory that questions and troubles me. The level of real estate speculation is rather high in Corsica and there is a Mafia influence on part of the territory linked in particular to the coast and to tourism.

This is also a genre film.
I’ve always seen Corsica as a land of the Western. First, there is this territorial conflict that has been going on for decades. For me, that’s the foundation of the classical Western: what separates savagery from civilisation? Here, it’s almost the reverse situation: how can a shepherd, who has his roots in a traditional practice, hold on in a zone completely invaded by ultra capitalism and all that comes with it? Another aspect is that of legend. One of my cult films is The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance by John Ford with its famous last line that sums up the essence of the Western pretty well: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” This made me think about Corsica where a kind of popular mythology regularly makes real individuals, figures of the movement for independence or criminals, move to the level of legendary characters. All this led me to a kind of contemporary Western. My debut feature already was a genre film with political content. I’m interested in using genre as a Trojan horse, in leading spectators into a story told at a cracking pace all while looking at the times, at my island, at the human at large.

Alexis Manenti has a very physical role as a hunted shepherd. Why did you choose him?
When I cast him, I felt like I had a real peasant in front of me. What I also liked was that this imposing body wasn’t an athletic one, because I was really interested in staging the escape of a man who isn’t sporty, to go a bit against the clichés of the action film. In his escape, in his way of defending himself or sometimes attacking others, there is always a kind of clumsiness. And Alexis also brought an extreme sensitivity, a real softness to a role that could have been very virile. He gives complexity to someone who doesn’t express himself much but from whom we feel the drama and the suffering more than the aggression.

What about the contrast between a very primitive dimension (the very physical hunt, a man of the earth, an ancestral profession) and the modernity of social media?
When I asked myself how to treat the legend, how to make it contemporary, the idea of social media immediately emerged. And beyond the archaic and the ultra modern, there was also a masculine-feminine aspect. The film opens on an octogenarian explaining that at a certain time, the lands on the coast were worth so little that they’d be bequeathed to the daughters, which says a lot about the way women were treated on this territory a few decades ago. I therefore really liked that this fight would be taken on by a young woman and that she’d politicise what her uncle was doing via this ultra modern medium.

(Translated from French)