A PROPHET

Release date: 22 January
Certificate: 18
155 mins
France/Italy 2009

Director: Jacques Audiard
Starring: Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Adel Bencherif, Hichem Yacoubi, Reda Kateb

French, Arabic and Corsican with English subtitles

Winner of the Grand Prix at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and deserving recipient of the inaugural Best Film Award at the London Film Festival, Jacques Audiard’s follow-up to THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED is a blistering crime drama.

Malik El Djebena (Rahim) is a young Arab man sentenced to six years in a French jail after violently assaulting a police officer. He arrives friendless and penniless in this Darwinian jungle.

Embroiled in a conflict between two powerful prison gangs, Malik must prove his worth to both sides if he is to stay alive.

But as the long years of his sentence roll on, Malik uses his ruthless cunning to establish himself as a major new player, not just behind the prison walls but also in the world beyond. Soon he is engaged in daring drug runs, hostage exchanges and bloody assassinations as he builds his own criminal empire.

A PROPHET moves fluidly from art-house subtlety to genre pyrotechnics, thanks in no small part to a star-making performance from Rahim. Audiard has created an endlessly powerful and absorbing tapestry of criminal life that has all the epic human drama of such classics as SCARFACE and THE GODFATHER.

//How Cinema Saved Me//
Jacques Audiard was in a dark place when cinema stepped in to save his soul. “I had been a scriptwriter for 10 or 12 years, and deep down I wasn’t satisfied,” he says, sitting resplendent in a London hotel, decked out in a pair of Wayfarers like the spiritual son of Jean-Luc Godard. Which, perhaps, he is. “The life of a scriptwriter is very solitary, and I found myself fallen into a hole,” he continues. “I was in a very deep state.”

Audiard’s writing career had taken him from the screenplay of 1984’s Jean-Paul Belmondo vehicle THE PROFESSIONAL to collaborations with the likes of Jean Rochefort, Catherine Deneuve and Fanny Ardant. But his move into directing with SEE HOW THEY FALL in 1994 set him on a path that would eventually lead to greatness, a term that can certainly be bestowed on him with confidence after the one-two punch of THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED and now A PROPHET.

To Audiard, film is about communication. It was that sense of connection between people that lifted him from the loneliness of the screenwriter into the delirious creativity that has marked the last decade of his work. “If I hadn’t had cinema at a specific time of my life I wouldn’t have been able to communicate, so if anyone said that cinema was anything other than communication, I wouldn’t understand,” he insists. “I’ve noticed one thing while I’ve been abroad, which is that the film doesn’t have the same meaning as when it’s shown in my country. But what astonishes me each time is that something has still been communicated, and I find that really moving.”