'This is a new way of thinking about Arabs'

JAMESON DUBLIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: Black Gold, the new star vehicle for French actor Tahar Rahim, is being hailed as the first Arab Spring movie, writes TARA BRADY

IT’S A bright wintry afternoon outside the Hotel Bristol in Paris but fortunately actor Tahar Rahim won’t have to stop here for too long.

“Last year I worked with a Belgian director. I worked with a Chinese director. I worked with a Scottish director,” he says. “This is maybe the only job that gives you the opportunity to live different lives and to travel across different universes. I just pack my bag and go all over the world.”

Rahim, who shot to fame as the charismatic lead of Jacques Audiard's knockout prison drama A Prophet, is part of a growing throng of young international thespians for whom Hollywood is a secondary consideration.

"Hollywood?" he smiles. "Why Hollywood? I want to go everywhere." Having won a brace of awards for his depiction of A Prophet's blossoming jail-yard kingpin, Rahim was not short of cross-Atlantic career options. Thus far, the 29-year-old has favoured far-flung locations and international co-productions over the ill-defined foreign villains who populate Anglophone cinema.

"I got sent a lot of crime dramas after A Prophet," says Rahim. "And I like crime dramas and I'd love to do another one some day. But nothing I was offered was interesting. I go for character and story. I would rather work with a great African director on a script that interested me than on something because it is American."

In this spirit his first English-language leading role is on the thoroughly multicultural Black Gold. Shot in Tunisia and Qatar, director Jean-Jacques Annaud's swashbuckling history recreates the beginnings of the modern oil industry as a 1,001 Nights epic. In it Rahim plays a mild-mannered prince forced to choose between his progressive father-in-law (Antonio Banderos) and traditional Muslim dad (Mark Strong) when Texan oil prospectors come courting.

“It was very sandy,” says Rahim. “We got to know the different sands and deserts. In Tunisia we had three kinds of desert – rocks, dry lake and dunes going all the way down to the sea. It’s a huge movie with huge, amazing spaces. It’s the kind of movie that just doesn’t get made anymore. It’s too difficult. We had to spend days on horses and camels just repeating battles like learning a martial art. I love camels now. They’re my friends. If you let them walk they never run. They don’t go crazy like horses can.”

Black Gold, the most expensive and lavish Middle Eastern production since Laurence of Arabia, has been hailed by CNN and other interested news outlets as the first Arab Spring movie. The brainchild of Tarak Ben Ammar, the headlining Tunisian producer of such varied offerings as Life of Brianand Hannibal Rising, the film is a pointedly post-colonial corrective to a century of swarthy cinema stereotypes.

“I was very happy to be part of this thing that might change the point of view for some audiences,” says the star. “This is a new way of thinking about Arabs and a new way of thinking about the Koran. Growing up, my brother had told me something about the first oil exchanges between the occident and the east. That’s what the movie talks about. This is what the Arab world should have had and should have been.”

Rahim, the youngest of his Algerian-born parents' eight children, grew up in the sleepy French town of Belfort, before relocating to Paris to study computer science. A lifelong movie buff, he soon switched to film school and was working in the experimental sector when he landed the life-changing gig on A Prophet.

“There was nothing to do where I grew up except to go to one of the two cinemas,” he says. “That was where I went to dream: that was where I went to do everything. I was lucky too. Today we have so many channels with so many cheesy programmes. When I was a kid 20 years ago there were only six channels and three of them showed old movies all day. I’m a small town boy. I go from living in a place with 50,000 people to Paris where there are nine million people. But I do not lose the habit of cinema.”

Later this year, Rahid heads up the cast of Free Men,a drama about an unlikely alliance between a Jewish man and an Algerian immigrant in Nazi-occupied Paris.

"It's a long time since La Haine," he says. "But I think only now we see an integration of Arab stories in movies and TV. It's important. Making a movie like Black Goldstarring someone like me – someone called Rahid – would have been impossible ten years ago. This is a real changing time."

Black Goldwill screen as part of the 10th Jameson Dublin International Film Festival on Sunday. See jdiff.com

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