For his first feature film, Yohan Manca moves with his gaze in love with humanity. On the occasion of the fortieth edition of the Amiens International Film Festival, we were able to meet the filmmaker who received the audience award. My brothers and I is to be discovered in the room. Maintenance. In My Brothers and I, Nour lives in a suburb by the sea. Between his mother's illness, the TIG for minors and the tricks of his three brothers, the teenager will free himself by meeting Sarah, a lyrical artist. 
Your first feature film is a free adaptation of Why my brothers and I, we are gone… by Hédi Tillette de Clermont-Tonnerre, a play you staged at the age of seventeen. Why did you choose it? It's very freely inspired, maybe I shouldn't have talked about it… (laughs) I kept some axes and some narrative arcs like the dying mother or the siblings by the sea. The idea was above all to totally compose around. Opera is not present at all in the play, for example. My film is a completely different object, even if the piece is very important to me. The first thing that comes to mind when you see My Brothers and I is the parallel with Abdellatif Kechiche's cinema, especially Voltaire's Fault. However, your film has a hybrid approach and is not totally in line with pure social realism. There is a multiplication of genres and references. What was your will through this film? It is certain that Kechiche's cinema hovers over my film, whether in its warmth, in what emerges from the body and in the naturalistic game. However, my references for My Brothers and Me go much more into the Italian cinema of the 60s and 70s, especially the cinema of Ettore Scola or that of Federico Fellini. All this generation of cinema that I admire and that constituted the Italian social comedy. References very present in Kechiche's cinema, hence this parallel in my opinion. You were talking about Abdellatif Kechiche's naturalistic game. He himself was an actor before becoming a director. As in his cinema, there are real performances of actors giving life to very authentic characters in your film. How did you work on casting and how do you direct your actors? I don't really have a particular way. First of all, I have a lot of confidence in them and they are people I admire for the most part. I think there is a certain relationship of trust that allows this authenticity. After, there is a lot of work upstream on the text and then the text goes through them. I tried to create an exchange and mutual trust with my actors. This is probably the most beautiful way to direct an actor. My brothers and I was shot in the city of Sète in Occitania. You make it a timeless and unrecognizable city. Why did you choose this particular city? Sète allowed me to imbue my vision of neighborhoods and draw up a multi-ethnicity. I wanted to use Sète to erase it and to imagine a suburb of the world. I wanted it to be as universal as possible and this city allowed me to do that. I also shot on film to create this timelessness. That was very important to me. We had to identify with these brothers, whether we were in a suburb of Buenos Aires or Naples. The story of My brothers and I is eternal. The art that saves this kid is a universal theme that crosses the ages. I felt that I still had to, through this story, shout it more than ever. Your film is about emancipation through art. Was it an autobiographical choice? When I was fourteen, I met a French teacher who made me want to do theater. It changed my view of my identity, the world and even my own family. It allowed me to take another path in life. I wanted to narrate this meeting through the film. I feel like you give a lot of yourself in a first film. My brothers and I have a lot of me, from the walls of the apartment to the characters. Like the dance in Stephen Daldry's Billy Elliot , we detect a confrontation between an art that at first glance is elitist, almost feminine from the point of view of the neighborhood, and the brutal universe of the Nour brothers. Why opera singing and what does it involve? Billy Elliot is a sublime film and when we seize such a subject, we can only refer to it. In My Brothers and I, the reflex to sing is rather associated with the feminine because of the precariousness of the environment, outside of rap culture. Then, yes. Opera is perceived today as an elitist art and that is a problem. In My Brothers and I, I wanted opera to return to its popular origins. I wanted to confront these two worlds. We can say to ourselves, by a bad reflex, that a young person from the suburbs can not be moved by listening to La Traviata. It was really something I wanted to fight through this story. A punch. Presented at Un Certain Regard at Cannes 2021, My Brothers and I is currently one of the best films on display.
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