Presented as a world premiere at CPH:DOX, where it received a Special Mention in the NEXT:WAVE section, and now awarded the Grand Prize in the National Competition at the Brussels International Film Festival (BRIFF), This Is Not a French Film is the debut feature by actor and theatre director Tom Adjibi. He plays an uncannily similar double who, tired of always being offered the same roles, boxed in by stereotypes, decides to question the film industry through a filmed diary in which he meets other racialised actors and actresses. Naturally, the exercise proves more confronting than it first appeared.

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Cineuropa: This Is Not a French Film is a hybrid movie that carries its contradiction right into its title. How would you introduce it?
Tom Adjibi: I’d say it’s a comedy shot like a satirical documentary about the struggles of a very motivated, yet rather awkward, young racialised actor who’s doing his best to make his first feature. The film’s protagonist is a slightly worse version of me; I obviously turned the dials up a bit to elicit humour. He’s a character in search of identity who initially wants to bear witness to a latent racism that isn’t always easy to identify, but who ultimately becomes fully aware of the situation and decides to make his own film.

Cinema, by literally assigning roles, is a powerful tool for perpetuating imposed identities and fuelling stereotypes.
Yes, and racism is so ingrained in society that it’s very hard to counter, which is also what the movie aims to convey. You see it as soon as you try to fight clichés and stereotypes. One of the actresses in the film, Melissa Diarra, says: "Once we've realised that we are all racist, we will already have taken a step forwards." Through our upbringing and the society we belong to, we internalise racism ourselves. An actor’s main tool is their body. It’s who we are, but also what is seen of us, and even what people project onto us. When directors write, what does their imagination look like? You quickly realise, when you receive scripts and watch films, that most imaginative worlds are extremely stereotyped. When I write, even I realise I’m conditioned, that my imagination is not free of racism. Besides, the film deals with very sensitive topics, and that inevitably creates tension. The very things I had been criticising, certain forms of violence, I realised that as a writer-director, and therefore as someone in a position of power, I had been able to reproduce them in some respects. Calling out racism while realising you may have perpetuated it yourself is deeply confronting.

Was it obvious from the outset that you would tackle this subject in a semi-fictional way, using your own identity?
Satirical docufiction is an artistic language I like. I like using humour because it’s a powerful weapon that allows you to reach a wider audience and confront them with an avowedly political discourse, using a certain levity. I identify a lot with what Sacha Baron Cohen did with Who Is America?, or Nathan Fielder with The Rehearsal, always straddling the line between reality and fiction. And then it’s such a cathartic film for me that I had to be deeply honest; it could only come from my own experience and from that of the people I shot with.

One of the movie’s key points is that, while it talks about actors and actresses we see far too little of, it also actually lets us see them.
It’s a film I’m very eager to share with an audience that feels concerned by the issue. I think it’s a cast that will do cinema some good. And I know that for some actors and actresses, being on set with other racialised actors, people who look like them, was ultimately quite new and enriching.

What mattered most to you with this film?
Above all, I wanted to encourage people directly concerned by the subject matter to want to make films, not only in front of but also behind the camera. I wanted to encourage them to motivate and organise themselves, to tell themselves it’s possible, and to seize the tool and make their own films with their own imagination, rather than staying stuck in someone else’s. Not just to criticise what we see, but to act and to claim their space, too.