Lise Akoka and Romane Guéret: “With my brother, we wanted to pay tribute to the intelligence of children”

The two directors of Les Pires reunite with the characters from their web series You Prefer for an irresistible summer chronicle, in the heart of a summer camp. A great film about today’s youth. Encounter.

Does the idea of My brother already existed in your heads before the release of Worse ?

Romane Guéret: Yes and that allowed us to avoid the famous question of the film after… My brother was really born from the desire to find Shirel Nataf, Fanta Kebe, Zakaria-Tayeb Lazab and Mouctar Diawara in the cinema, whom we had met when they were 11-12 years old and who had already been at the heart of the birth of the series You prefertoured while writing the Worse. It was nice to have, as soon as this one was released in theaters, an idea in the making that we really liked and that we were able to get hold of easily.

How was his writing constructed?

Lise Akoka: She deployed over three years with our co-screenwriter Catherine Paillé, relying on numerous immersions in summer camps and improvisation workshops in Montreuil with children. We have a lot of notes, recorded moments, then we transcribed everything into a gigantic directory of thousands of pages from which we drew. And from all this a 130-page screenplay was born.

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You who have been working on and with young people for all these years, what has jumped out at you over the time spent working with them?

RG: The way these children reinvent the language, by mixing slang with very literary French. Through My brotherwe wanted to pay tribute to their intelligence and humor. And this by constantly situating ourselves at their level, never at the level of the adults that we are. And we found them much more open than we were probably at their age and than the number of adults today!

So here you find Shirel Nataf who we had also seen since You preferIn We are made to get along by Pascal Elbé, Fifi by Jeanne Aslan and Paul Saintillan and Small by Julie Lerat-Gersant and who will be on March 26 in Les Filles du ciel by Bérangère McNeese. How did you discover it?

LA: I met her and Fanta – in our heads, we are unable to separate them – when she was 11, on The Melody by Rachid Hami where I was a child coach who toured in their neighborhood, Place des Fêtes, in Paris. They had been discovered through wild casting after leaving high school. Like Fanta, Shirel had never acted, never even dreamed of cinema. And yet she had everything: total ease, crazy freedom, an ability to completely ignore the image she projects, a disarming naturalness, incredible charisma. It remains a fascinating mystery!

RG: What had to be built in her was less the game – which she possessed instinctively – than the ability to evolve in an environment totally foreign to her own: the codes, the discipline, the work. And we’ve seen him mature over the years.

LA: She’s always in tune, even when she doesn’t yet fully understand what she’s playing. She has a phenomenal work force. No one around her had pushed her to do this; she fought alone, for the pure joy of playing. It’s not just a “nature.” She and Fanta have a rare ability to summon deep emotions. They are little girls who have become young women, who have been damaged by life and a difficult childhood. And cinema acted as a catharsis that allowed them to transform all this into artistic power.

Facing them, we find a single known face in My brother : Amel Bent. What made you want to give her the role of Sabrina, the director of this summer camp?

LA: For this role, we were very open. We did wild casting but also saw professional actors. We thought of Amel because she comes from La Courneuve and her story resonated a lot with that of Sabrina. She had almost never acted apart from a TV movie, White sandals, in 2021. She was very stressed, but she worked a lot. To get the role and then to embody it. And above all, she understood very quickly what was being asked of her. She’s an artist, a real one. And then there was immediate chemistry with Shirel and Fanta and, on set, she really took care of the children. She became Sabrina!

The Worst. By Lise Akoka and Romane Guéret. With Shirel Nataf, Fanta Kebe, Amel Bent… Duration: 1h52. Released February 7, 2025