"’I’m turning the camera on.’ ‘What the hell are you doing?’ ‘I’m filming.’" The scene takes place on the docks of Marseille. A journalist is asking a drug trafficker to explain how, the following Monday, with the help of the dockworkers his organisation has paid off, they’ll retrieve a container holding three tonnes of cocaine from Colombia, where one of their associates is being held hostage as collateral until the operation is successfully concluded – like he says, "Don’t mess this up or I’m dead.” Welcome to Moolah (American slang for money), Jérôme Pierrat’s entertaining debut feature, which just premiered in the Orizzonti section of the 83rd Venice Film Festival.

Pierrat, an established French documentarian known for his immersions in the criminal world, enters the film scene by turning his vast knowledge and experience of the underworld into an offbeat comedy spun along the yarn of an often hilarious mockumentary underlining the blurred ethical boundaries which characterise this kind of journalism.

‘Do not take part in the business. Do not tell the coppers about them gangsters, or the gangsters about the cops. Do not film any harm done to people.” Despite these warnings, Jérôme (played by the director himself), a journalist brought behind the scenes of the above-mentioned operation by a boss named Charlie (Jean Ruimi) who happens to trust him, will be forced to get his hands dirty when Narcotics officers are spotted staking out the area. With a sword of Damocles hanging over his head (as the traffickers think he has tipped off the police), he keeps shooting as much as he can. But everything is bound to go from bad to worse.

Moolah, carried by a cast of proper thug mugs with eccentric, larger-than-life personalities (all hailing from the real criminal world, and therefore very familiar with it) including the ever-wary Mawdoo (Jean-Michel Correia), Titus the logistician (Patrice Kouyoumdjian), Coluche (Thierry Coignard), in charge of the subsequent distribution of the product, and young and impulsive newbie De Niro (Kader Benchouda), immerses the viewer in minute detail in all the technical aspects of the trade (which involves discreetly popping the customs seals on the cocaine container and exfiltrating the goods, placing surveillance cameras in the police officers’ hotel room, intercepting their phone communications and following their movements with GPS trackers, etc.) and the paranoid atmosphere that goes with it – "When in doubt, there is no doubt," is the logic that applies – and can quickly escalate into a full-on settling of scores even within the same crew as they are stuck in the same small house, waiting for things to play out – cooking, trading anecdotes, cracking jokes, bickering, tweaking their strategy, etc. All of this is captured by the journalist-cameraman – “‘My face ain’t blurred here!’ ‘That’s done in post.’” – in footage which wonderfully mimics video work done on the fly – bumps, interruptions, interviews, slices of life, to-camera debriefs by the (increasingly anxious) director and all.

The film, which appears to be very astutely built on simple, yet precise and truly funny twists, paints a picture of this world of gangsters no film has ever shown before. Until the chilling finale comes as a brutal reminder that none of this is a joke.

Moolah was produced by Iconoclast Films, which is also handling international sales, with Shotinmars and Fatalitas Productions.