Dangerous Borders: Yves Piat On His Short "Nefta Football Club"
Yves Piat discovered the world of cinema through his technician work as a decorator and studio manager on set for the production Fouillet Wieber. His first film, Tempus Fugit, starring Maurice Garrel was selected in Odense, Interfilm and Drama. His latest feature, Nefta Football Club, shares the story of two boys who stumble on something unusual, which creates an unexpected (and hilarious) event.
In the south of Tunisia, two football fan brothers bump into a donkey lost in the middle of the desert on the border of Algeria. Strangely, the animal wears headphones over its ears.
Piat’s live-action short film stars Lyes Salem (Munich) and won a series of Audience Awards, including Clermont-Ferrand and Florida Film Festival and the Oscar-qualifying Best Comedy award at Aspen Shortsfest. We talk to Yves about his short, soccer, dangerous borders, the woes of working with children and donkeys, and much more!
You discovered cinema through your technician work as a decorator and studio manager. Describe what that was like and how you eventually found your way to writing and directing.
Actually, I used to work in an animation studio — I have been drawing since my childhood. When I was 16, I started to make fake ads and false promotion tools, including an anti-smoking ad in 1998 that got eventually rejected by the audit office. Then I made a short-length film with French actor Maurice Garrel, which took me five years to make because of a failing production team. That's why I waited so long to get back on the track .
What inspired the story for Nefta Football Club?
There are many things that have inspired the movie. First, it was a personal experience from my childhood. When I was 14, my friend and I would systematically sneak out to forbidden places with torchlights. One day, we found things that we thought to be drug material (twisted spoon, a camping stove and thousand of little plastic bags full of white powder). We decided to take all this on our motorcycle and dump it in the water without really thinking about what we were doing. Our decision may have cost someone’s life or something important. It’s a story I kept for more than 30 years now. This is how it got started. I wanted the movie to take place at the border between Morocco and Algeria because I was amazed by the fantastic landscapes I saw there and imagined that the desert would play a great part in the story. Border zones are often dangerous, it is a no man’s land going from a state to another literally. Regarding the story about the donkey and the walkman, it’s a true story. I found it funny to bring this misunderstanding with the music. For the football field, the idea came to me after I saw all these kids playing football all along my trip, from north to south Morocco. All these little stories stayed somewhere in my mind/head to finally merged in one, The Nefta Club.
Football (soccer) plays a big part in the film. What does the sport mean to you personally?
I don't like the competitive or the financial aspect of soccer, but I wanted it to highlight the connection between the game and its stakes; the spontaneous aspect versus the element of the calculation; the gap between childhood and teenage years symbolized by the two brothers. Mohammed takes a big risk when he tries to make money off of his discovery but he is stopped by his little brother’s innocence, who just wants to keep playing with him like before. The story is completely related to soccer. From the beginning, we are talking about Riyad Mahrez, who is an Algerian football player, and about borders, and we end up on boundaries of the football field done with the pushers' cocaine, who are big football fans too.
What were some of the pains of working with a donkey? Are they as stubborn as they say?
In fact, I made a casting of two donkeys in the film Nefta football Club. The whole team preferred another donkey but I liked the one that was in the film.
The short is full of some really stunning landscapes. How did you find some of these beautiful locations, and what was your approach to capturing them?
Initially, I wanted to film in Zagora, in the Moroccan desert and that’s actually where the script began, on the Algerian border. I’m pretty familiar with the region around Zagora since I spent six days walking across the desert with a guide a few years ago, and I went there several times while scouting locations for the film. The desert land of the Zagora plain captivated me, and I knew from the beginning that the desert would have an important role in the film. After I had all my scouting done in southern Morocco and I’d contacted the local authorities, we eventually decided with my producers from Les Valseurs to shoot the film in Tunisia, barely a month before shooting began and primarily for economic reasons. The Nefta region was ideal because, on the one hand, it was still on the Algerian border, as the script had it, and the landscapes we were looking for were not too far apart (from an hour to an hour and a half at most) and they looked like the ones around Zagora. It's also one of the places where the first Star Wars film was shot! (Laughs). The great landscapes drive us using cinemascope format, referencing the great Western genre.
The leads of the film are both young actors. How did you find them?
The complicity between the boys was one of the features I was searching for. As soon as I decided to do a cast of street children in Tunis, I met El Tayef Dhaoui ... he was very motivated and was always on time, unlike many children who came to the set sometimes and I saw hundreds of them and finally chose El Tayef. On the set, El Tayef was incredibly professional. He had a sense of rhythm and he understood very quickly what I asked him. Every take was good and he was never tired. This child — who is now a teenager — was really impressive and incredibly kind! Regarding the little Dali, it was a completely different story: I met him a few days before shooting while I was walking in Tunis with Raja Kader, my translator. I wasn't really satisfied with the young man previously cast for the role of Momo. So, as we finally end up in this dance classroom where there was this boy, Dali, twice as small as the other boys since he was 7 but incredibly freed from inhibitions. I was amazed by his presence and asked his father if he wanted his son to appear in a film that was shot outside the school and during holidays. He said, "Yes."
Dali was incredibly innocent but he was quickly tired. So we rehearsed the week before the shooting because these children had never made cinema or had even been in a theater. I had to be sure that once he was there, he was not going to give up. One day, he even managed to disappear from the set while we were looking at him. Five minutes later, he was coming back on a bike he probably found in the village near the shooting location. As a 7 years old child, he was easily distracted by other children, he wanted to leave to play with them... He brought freshness and candor that I was looking for in this character, but it was really difficult to work with.
What do you want audiences to take away from the film?
I'm really happy that the film has met its audience(s), in the entire world moreover! We received so many prizes; we have even qualified for the 2020 Oscar Ceremony, which is pretty amazing! We are now eligible to be considered for a 2020 Academy Award. Clermond Ferrand, Aspen or Palm Springs, it's the same warm welcome from the public. I hope this is going to last a bit...
It is important to be aware of the social difficulties and finally to understand why people come to traffic drugs in its border regions.
What’s next for you?
I am currently working on a full length-feature film taking place in Tanger about migrants and smugglers.
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