French Directors Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma on Exploring Teenage Angst With Pop Power in Venice Competition Film ‘And Their Children After Them’
variety.comZoran Boukherma are primed for an international splash once their fourth feature, “And Their Children After Them,” premieres in competition at this year’s Venice Film Festival.
Adapted from a literary sensation that won the Prix Goncourt, France’s equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize, the film explores teenage heartache and working-class doldrums with a novelistic sweep, playing as a coming-of-age power ballad full of operatic emotions and chart-topping tunes. “We wanted to turn a story made up of fairly ordinary, small conflicts into something vast and cinematic,” says director Zoran Boukherma, who co-wrote with his brother Ludovic after actor-filmmaker Gilles Lellouche handed each of them a copy of the book over lunch two years ago. “That idea stemmed from our discussion with Gilles and with [original author] Nicolas Mathieu, who recognized that a very small event could lead to an entire family’s downfall.
The book explores the tragedy of ordinary people and the romance of everyday life, and we needed to do the same [on a cinematic scaler],” says Ludovic Boukherma.
Lellouche, who stars in “And Their Children After Them,” initially approached the Boukherma brothers to write a series based on the book, but ultimately let them take over the project and turn it into a movie after he decided to focus on his own movie “Beating Hearts” which competed at this year’s Cannes.
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